Khiara M. Bridges — Expecting Inequity
Legal scholar examines how structural racism operates inside reproductive healthcare, shaping the experiences of pregnant patients in concrete and measurable ways.
Why we picked this
Bridges combines legal scholarship with ethnographic research in prenatal clinics — it's a rare methodological combination, and it produces findings that are hard to dismiss.
Khiara M. Bridges’s work on reproductive healthcare and race draws on both legal analysis and years of ethnographic fieldwork in prenatal clinics serving low-income women of color. Her book “Expecting Inequity” documents how structural racism operates not through individual prejudice alone but through policies, institutional practices, and legal frameworks that produce racially disparate outcomes regardless of anyone’s intentions.
Bridges is a professor at Berkeley Law and the author of several books on race, law, and healthcare, including “The Poverty of Privacy Rights.” Her work sits at the intersection of critical race theory and constitutional law, and she has a track record of making complex legal arguments legible without diluting them.
The talk will address what structural racism looks like in medical settings, how law enables or constrains it, and what reproductive justice requires beyond the narrow frame of abortion rights. Open to audience questions.