On Thursday, March 7, Health Bridges invited Jaclyn Serpico, a fellow at the UCLA School of Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, to talk to students about the intricacies of reproductive healthcare and her research on reproductive rights.
The talk took place in Pomona College’s Hahn Hall and is the latest in the speaker series put on by Health Bridges — a student-run nonprofit organization under the Draper Center — which has focused on gender and health. With funding from and in collaboration with the Berger Institute at Claremont McKenna College, this series has been going on for the past two semesters. Previous talks have covered topics such as transgender rights, HIV prevention and public health equity.
Abigail Krenz PO ’26, a student organizer for Health Bridges, outlined how Serpico’s expertise and the “hot topic” of abortion aligns with the speaker series’ mission.
“What we want to bring with this series is more of an interdisciplinary understanding of health, so that means bringing in the policy expert and the lawyer in order to bring more diverse perspectives,” Krenz said. “I hope that the speaker series can open engagement on topics that are difficult and as a student organization, we have a role in ensuring that we’re contributing to a campus that really thinks about issues of justice and equity.”
Before getting into the nuance of current Supreme Court cases, Serpico briefly discussed the research that backs medical abortions.
“In the United States, we use two drugs; that’s the best practice and most evidence-based, safest and most effective way to do it,” she said. “The first one is called Mifepristone, which you take to end the pregnancy, and then a second medication called Misoprostol, which you take about 24 hours later, expels the pregnancy.”
Serpico explained the unique learning process for medicine and for Mifepristone specifically.
“[After] 16 years of Mifepristone being allowed … there was a more effective way to do it because doctors could prescribe different doses and figure out what was working best for people,” she said.
Since its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in September 2000, many changes have been made to improve the distribution and administration of the drug.
Serpico also explained the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the expansion of telemedicine, which allows for virtual doctor visits that can prescribe medicine remotely. This development led to the 2021 removal of in-person dispensing requirements for Mifepristone, a change made permanent in December 2023.
“Before this, you had to actually go to a physician who would give you the pill, which was an unnecessary regulation,” she said. “Whereas once everything started to move toward telemedicine you could just teleconference and the pill could be mailed to you.”
In November 2022, a group of anti-abortion health professionals called Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) filed a suit against the FDA for its approval of Mifepristone in a Texas federal court. The choice of filing it in Texas was intentional, as U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas Matthew Kacsmaryk — an appointee of former President Donald Trump and a conservative Christian — demonstrated a record for leaning toward anti-abortion viewpoints.
For example, Kacsmaryk wrote an article in 2015 in which he claimed a woman’s right to reproductive health is simply an “erotic desire of liberated adults.”
Kacsmaryk proceeded to rule in favor of AHM and this ruling rolled back the FDA approval of the drug. Serpico made a point to highlight that this suspension relied on the scientific evidence of two studies that have since been retracted.
Serpico explained the message that Kacsmaryk’s ruling had.
“[The ruling said that] the FDA should never have approved this drug and it can’t be sold in U.S. markets,” she said.
The case has since moved from the district court to the U.S. Department of Justice, then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and now to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this Tuesday, March 26.
Serpico pointed out a couple of issues consequential to the court ruling in favor of rolling back Mifepristone.
“[It] would be required to be dispensed in person and only by licensed physicians,” she said. “The drug labeling would also be out of date. It would recommend this unnecessarily early gestational limit. It would recommend a dosing regimen that is less effective and causes more side effects. So that would obviously not [be] good for patients.”
Continuing with her theme of Supreme Court cases, Serpico also spoke about the upcoming in vitro fertilization (IVF) case, which will be heard this summer. In this case, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that couples whose IVF embryos were accidentally destroyed while in storage at a facility in Alabama could file wrongful death lawsuits, essentially equating the value of an embryo to that of a child’s life. Seroico explained the context around this ruling.
“The background as to why this is happening is the fetal personhood movement, which is a decades-old movement in the United States to confer the full legal and constitutional status of a person to embryos or fetuses before birth,” she said.
She further explained how the fetal personhood movement was being established in the state.
“‘Children’ in the Alabama Supreme or State Constitution includes not only children who are born, but also fetuses and embryos, including embryos that are frozen in vitro and not in the uterus,” Serpico said.”That has been hugely destabilizing to IVF practice in Alabama and is having ripple effects in other states because providers in other states are getting nervous.”
Serpico explained her motivation for giving the talk, emphasizing the importance of discourse around this topic.
“One, it’s important for folks to be educated about what’s happening,” she said in an interview with TSL. “Two, I think it’s important for people with different levels of knowledge, different perspectives, different opinions, to be able to talk about controversial issues. It helps to have the facts when you’re talking about things and to be able to have your conversations really be grounded in the facts.”
Students in attendance found the talk to be timely and topical, as well as having provided an understandable overview of complex issues.
“I think it’s a very relevant issue, especially with all the Supreme Court hearings coming up this summer,” Stella Markey SC ’24 said. “On the news, we hear a lot about things that happen at a national level, but [Serpico] really delved into things that have not gotten as much attention.”
Along with discourse and education on abortion and its role in the United States, Serpico suggested that civic and political participation is a way in which people should get involved.
“I know you hear it a lot, but vote; a lot of this is determined democratically at the ballot,” she said. “Judicial elections are extremely important. If you live in a jurisdiction where judges are elected, that’s hugely, hugely important and something that often goes unnoticed.”
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