Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Michael S. Goldberg

In a recent law review article, Elizabeth Sepper (CAS’02) begins not with a court citation or legislative reference. Instead, the University of Texas law professor recounts the personal experiences of Misha, Sidrah, and Jill. All three women—a Unitarian Universalist, a Muslim, and a conservative Christian, respectively—leaned on their deep religious faith in deciding to terminate their pregnancies.

“We rarely hear from religious people who choose abortion,” Sepper, a scholar on the intersection of law, religion, reproduction and sex equality, wrote in “Free Exercise of Abortion” for the Brigham Young University Law Review. “The religious position on abortion is assumed to be anti-choice.” And yet each year, she notes, 60 percent of the approximately 900,000 Americans who choose abortion instead of childbearing report a religious affiliation.

Anchoring these women’s stories at the start of her article not only fits Sepper’s argument that “we undertake reproductive decisions consistent with conscience and religious faith.” It also reflects her approach to engaging with people—especially with those who consider themselves conservatives with strong faith backgrounds—about the issues most urgent in their lives and in her work as a teacher, scholar, and advocate. Her goal: To get people to rethink their assumptions, to understand the complexity and nuance in the intersection between law, religion, sexuality and health care on issues like abortion, and the treatment of same-sex marriage and gender identity.

The law review article emerged from a talk on law and religion that Sepper gave at Brigham Young. It was one in a series of invitations the reproductive rights advocate has received to speak at conservative universities, including conservative Christian institutions, opportunities that she embraces.

“I’ve spoken at schools that are extremely lockstep with evangelical Christianity, and yet, I always know that I’m talking to someone [who] wanted to hear me. And that’s why I’m there,” says Sepper. “And at BYU with ‘Free Exercise of Abortion,’ what I thought is, I want to complicate this really simplistic narrative of a binary between religion on one side, and abortion on the other with no bridge between the two.”s

She adds: “All religions have some degree of nuance to their abortion views.”

Historical Roots

Sepper, who delivered the convocation speech for the College of Arts & Sciences history department on May 17, turned to law school after an academic disappointment. While earning her history degree at BU, she minored in Italian and French. She was a finalist for a Fulbright scholarship to further develop her senior thesis on the subject of rape and a woman’s reputation in eighteenth-century Venice. A few weeks before graduation, Sepper learned the program had rejected her application.

Sepper says her interest in European history, international human rights, and the chance to “think about events on the transnational scale” led her to explore a legal education. After a stint at a small law firm, she earned her law degrees at New York University, concentrating on international legal studies. After graduating, she worked at Human Rights Watch and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and clerked for a circuit court judge in Philadelphia.

Looking back, Sepper says, makes it possible to see her career trajectory. But it did not feel like a strategic process at the time. And that is something her students take comfort in. “They find it quite reassuring that you can back into a career that you very much enjoy, rather than setting out from the get-go and knowing exactly where you’ll end up,” she says.

Where Sepper has ended up is in the middle of the action, based at the flagship state university in Texas where legislative leaders are working to restrict abortion access.

She is a regular interview subject for media outlets on national and state court cases and legislative actions, especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. But it’s not only abortion. She also is sought after for comment when a legal decision makes it easier for businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people based on their assertion of religious belief, for example.

Sepper says she balances her interests in engaging with the public discourse on issues central to her work with her research and teaching courses such as health law and first-year law students’ torts requirement. “Teaching always comes first,” she says.

The Importance of Storytelling

Sepper says that she still exercises the academic muscles she gained as a history major studying Europe: to compare and contrast different approaches that societies have to solving common problems. Take health law. Human anatomy remains the same everywhere, while policy choices vary, especially in the U.S. “When you look at the U.S. healthcare system, you think, well, this is an intractable problem. If you look at other countries, you think everyone else has figured out how to solve this,” she says.

Sepper’s approach of bringing varied lenses to familiar situations—outlining the details that guide healthcare policy in different countries, for example, or researching and recounting the personal stories of religious people making urgent reproductive health decisions—tie in with her undergraduate studies. It’s evident in the way she discusses her career and comes through in her research, including “Free Exercise of Abortion” which references news reports, books, and podcasts as well as court decisions and academic journals.

“There is a lot of affinity between history and law. Litigators, for instance, are storytellers. They need to be able to tell a story about their clients, but they also need to tell a story about the past,” she says.

“Because we’re using precedent, we need to look at the past legal cases and fit the client’s story into those precedents. It looks very close to what students are doing when they write history papers and what historians are doing when they are presenting their findings to the world.”