Erika Bachiochi

Fellow

Fellow Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar who works at the intersection of constitutional law, political theory, women’s history, and Catholic social teaching. She is a Professor of Practice at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in the history of political thought, directs the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought, and serves as founding editor-in-chief of its online journal, Fairer Disputations.

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Fellow Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar who works at the intersection of constitutional law, political theory, women’s history, and Catholic social teaching. She is a Professor of Practice at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in the history of political thought, directs the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought, and serves as founding editor-in-chief of its online journal, Fairer Disputations.

A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, she remains a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA where she founded its Wollstonecraft Project. Her book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021, and was named a finalist for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2022 Conservative Book of the Year award. She is also the editor of two books, Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching (Pauline Books & Media, 2010) and The Cost of “Choice”: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion (Encounter Books, 2004). Her academic articles can be found at SSRN.

Ms. Bachiochi’s more popular essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Politico, First Things, American Compass, Compact, CNN.com, The New Digest, National Review Online, National Affairs, Institute for Family Studies, Claremont Review of Books, SCOTUSblog, National Catholic Register, America, and Public Discourse.

Ms. Bachiochi serves on the Advisory Boards/Councils of the Moral Ecology Trust; the Center for the Law and the Human Person at CUA; the American Institute for Boys and Men; the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum; and St. Thomas More Academy (South Bend). She is a co-founder of St. Benedict Classical Academy in Natick, MA, and serves on the Board of Trustees at Montrose School.

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The Equality Act’s Implications for Abortion Would Be Devastating for Pregnant Women in the Workplace

Erika Bachiochi

The Equality Act’s sponsors seem to be trying to retool the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, transforming it from a law that is explicitly neutral as to abortion into a mechanism that may well be construed to require health care providers to perform abortions and states to fund them.

Articles

America Magazine / February 25, 2021

The Merits of Romney’s Pro-Family Policy

Erika Bachiochi

Sen. Mitt Romney’s “Family Security Act” has many merits as a response to the bleak trends highlighted by the pandemic. More important still, it would serve as an overdue corrective to liberalism’s devastating effects on the family.

Articles

First Things / February 11, 2021

The Contested Meaning of Women’s Equality

Erika Bachiochi

However much we might like our daughters and sons to see their fundamental equality emblazoned in the text of the Constitution, strict equality will not give mothers and fathers the support they need. A more intentional and robust family policy, on the other hand, just might.

Articles

Interview: Erika Bachiochi on the Future of Pro-Life Feminism

Erika Bachiochi

The question that divides us is how we ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry: the reality that women carry disproportionate burdens due to our special role in human reproduction.

Articles

Public Discourse / October 31, 2020

There’s No Good Case Against Confirming Amy Coney Barrett

Erika Bachiochi

Given the strength of Judge Barrett’s record, perhaps playing to the fears of the American public — who aren’t likely to be reading commentaries on the upcoming Supreme Court term but are voting soon — was the Democrats’ only play.

Articles

CNN / October 13, 2020

Amy Coney Barrett: A New Feminist Icon

Erika Bachiochi

Feminism is changing, and Barrett’s replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg will show how.

Articles

Politico / September 27, 2020

What I Will Teach My Children About Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Erika Bachiochi

Justice Ginsburg lived a heroic life in many ways. But to truly realize across our culture her noble vision for caregiving, we will have to point our children to others, those who recognize unborn children not as potential hindrances to the contributions we might make in the world but as reasons for greater solidarity with one another.

Articles

America Magazine / September 24, 2020

How Women Made the Moral Case for Suffrage

Erika Bachiochi

The suffragists worked for seventy years to convince both males and other females that women ought to share in the political responsibilities of republican government. The arguments that won the day one hundred years ago should help us think correctly about rights today.

Articles

First Things / August 26, 2020

What Does Justice Roberts’s Ruling Mean for the Pro-Life Cause?

Erika Bachiochi

Pro-lifers have waited nearly a half century for the Court to repudiate its entire ill-founded abortion jurisprudence.

Articles

Public Discourse / July 2, 2020

The Chief Justice Restores the Casey Standard Even While Undermining Women’s Interests in Louisiana

Erika Bachiochi

A jurisprudence that treated women’s interests as distinct from those of abortion providers might come rather to see abortion for what it really is: a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to keep women from demanding more, more of men, more of employers, more of medicine, more of the community at large.

Articles

SCOTUSblog / June 30, 2020

The Troubling Ideals at the Heart of Abortion Rights

Erika Bachiochi

Equality premised on the power to end life is not true equality at all.

Articles

The Atlantic / January 24, 2020

In Trump’s Court Pick, Who Won?

Erika Bachiochi

Should the President have another chance, and should that chance come in the form of the retirement of an aged Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump should pull the trigger and nominate Amy Coney Barrett.

Articles

CNN / July 10, 2018