We're pleased to announce our 2024 Keynote Speaker, Attorney Molly Duane, Senior Staff Attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights!
It took 50 years for anti-abortion activists to overturn Roe v. Wade, the first time in our nation’s history that the Supreme Court took away a constitutional right. As a reproductive rights attorney, Molly Duane knows that it could take her whole career, if not longer, to rebuild the comprehensive right to reproductive autonomy that American women need to live full and equal lives. Ms. Duane has already been working on the front lines for a decade, but she is just getting started.
Molly Duane is a graduate of Princeton University, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is currently a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where, for the last 8 years, she has been litigating abortion rights cases in federal and state court. She has worked on cases across the country including in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida. Her work has focused most on Texas, where she has challenged multiple burdensome abortion regulations as well as S.B. 8, the law that effectively banned abortion in Texas a year before Roe was overturned.
She is currently litigating several cases in Texas on behalf of women denied abortions during severe obstetrical complications seeking clarity regarding the scope of the state’s medical exception to its abortion bans. At the end of last year, she argued the Zurawski v. Texas case before the Texas Supreme Court and represented Kate Cox in seeking court approval to receive a medically necessary abortion.
The League believes that public policy in a pluralistic society must affirm the constitutional right of privacy of the individual to make reproductive choices. Issues around reproductive rights mobilize voters (especially young voters) like few other issues. You can empower voters and defend democracy by attending and supporting our annual Making Democracy Work® dinner on April 19, 2024 at the Embassy Suites Dallas Park Central.