Lader Lecture

2023 Lader Lecture

"Stating the Obvious: Lessons Learned From Epic Failures"

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Grand Rounds

This event is not open to the public. Please contact Louise King, MD, JD if you have questions.

2023 Lecturer Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN
Professor, Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing; Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, University of Washington, School of Nursing

About the Lader Lecture

The lecture was established by a gift from advocate and author Lawrence Lader, and began in 1997 when Faye Wattleton, former head of Planned Parenthood, delivered the lecture "Reproductive Freedom for the 21st Century." The Lader Lecture, which is managed by the Center for Bioethics and organized by committee members representing Harvard's teaching hospitals, is a public forum spotlighting the broad range of medical, ethical, social, and scientific issues surrounding human reproduction.

Lawrence Lader (1919-2006) was a journalist and abortion rights advocate. A 1941 graduate of Harvard College, he was the co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and the founder of Abortion Rights Mobilization, which actively sought the legalization in the United States of RU-486 (mifepristone). Lader published hundreds of articles over six decades in the nation's leading publications, including The Nation, The New Republic, New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times. Among Mr. Lader's published books are "The Margaret Sanger Story: The Fight for Birth Control" (1955) the first published biography of Margaret Sanger; "Abortion" (1966), which was cited multiple times in the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision; and "A Private Matter: RU-486 and the Abortion Crisis" (1995).

Past Lader Lectures

The Supreme Court and the
Fate of Roe v. Wade

Wednesday, October 20, 2021
5:00 – 6:00 p.m. ET
2021 Lecturer Linda Greenhouse, MSL 

About Linda Greenhouse: Linda Greenhouse is a senior research scholar and lecturer in law at Yale Law School, where she has taught since 2009. For the preceding thirty years, she was the New York Times Supreme Court correspondent and earned a number of major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for her coverage of the Court. She has written widely about the law and politics of abortion. Her New York Times Magazine article, “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?”, published in January 1970, was one of the first articles for a general readership about the emerging legal framework for the abortion debate. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard, and earned a Master of Studies in Law Degree from Yale Law School. She has been a member of several nonprofit boards, including the Harvard Board of Overseers (2009-2015) and currently serves as president of the American Philosophical Society, the first woman to hold that position since the society’s founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1943.