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Lauren MacIvor Thompson

Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of reproductive health, women's rights, and the law. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University and also serves as the faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law's Center for Law, Health, and Society.

Her book, Rivals and Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press in 2024. She has published numerous academic articles and op-eds including work in Law and History Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, among others. Thompson is also a frequent public speaker, including presentations at the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as well as national and international symposiums on suffrage and legal rights, reproduction, health, and medicine. She is a member of the national Scholars Strategy Network.

Sept. 19, 2022

Mary Ware Dennett & the Birth Control Movement

For birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, the personal was political. After a difficult labor and delivery with her third child, a physician told Mary Ware Dennett she should not have any more children, but he told her n…