LEAF's Personhood Speaker Series will create a space to discuss what makes a ‘person’ and whose voices need centering in conversations about gender equality in 2020 and beyond.

Our third panel will focus on reproductive justice and its role in affirming personhood. A term coined by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, reproductive justice represents a broad vision of safety, health, and dignity. It demands that every individual be able to make their own choices about their reproductive life and that safe, affordable reproductive health services are accessible to all. It also requires that all people live in social, economic, and political conditions that allow them to raise families with dignity in safe and healthy environments.

The panel will feature Alisa Lombard, lawyer and lead counsel on a proposed class action pertaining to the forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Saskatchewan; Akinisie Qumaluk, a midwife from Puvirnituq in Nunavik, Quebec; and Hadiya Roderique, speaker, writer, consultant, and EDI researcher. Joanna Erdman, an Associate Professor and the MacBain Chair in Health Law and Policy at the Schulich School of Law, will moderate the discussion.

This panel discussion will explore the origins, meaning, and importance of reproductive justice. Our speakers will discuss how reproductive justice is and is not present in their lives and their work, as well as in current movements for gender equality. They will discuss how we can work to ensure reproductive care is gender-affirming as well as culturally affirming. They will unpack how we can take steps to decolonize the reproductive justice movement, and work towards reproductive self-determination.

The funds raised through LEAF's Personhood Speaker Series will continue to support our work to advance substantive equality rights in Canada through litigation, law reform and education.

Thank you to our generous sponsors for making this event possible: CUPE National, UFCW Canada, Delaney Capital Management, BMO, Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, Koskie Minsky LLP, Ontario Nurses' Association, Goldblatt Partners LLP, The Law Society of Ontario, Stockwoods LLP, Lax O'Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP, Kastner Law, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, Lerners LLP, AMAPCEO, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association (OECTA) and Madame Premier.