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.
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.
A Putative Right in Search of a Constitutional Justification: Understanding Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s Equality…
Erika Bachiochi
The justices’ concerns about women’s equality are the key interpretative lens through which to understand the controversial reaffirmance of Roe v. Wade, but one which has been inadequately explored and critiqued on the part of those critical of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Articles
Quinnipiac Law Review / November 15, 2017
Reflections on My Time in Rome as a Speaker at the Conference Commemorating Popularum Progressio
Erika Bachiochi
The Church must prioritize the health and strength of every marriage – for who else in the world right now knows how important each and every marriage is to the development of persons and of nations?
Articles
Mirror of Justice blog / April 6, 2017
I’m a Feminist Against Abortion. Why Exclude Me from a March for Women?
Erika Bachiochi
An authentic women’s movement—one that properly extols human dignity, care, and non-violence—must be unabashedly pro-life.
Articles
CNN / January 18, 2017
Families, Schools, and Churches: The Building Blocks of a Healthy Social Ecology
Erika Bachiochi
To create a society in which human beings can flourish, we must support child-raising families, schools that intentionally cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, and local church communities.
Articles
The Public Discourse / January 18, 2017
Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology
Erika Bachiochi
If we are to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology we must take far more seriously the care, nurture, and cultivation of children and young people in virtue.
Articles
The Public Discourse / January 17, 2017
Embodied Caregiving
Erika Bachiochi
Modern thought has largely neglected dependency, instead touting individual autonomy and rational self-interest. If we are to recover the human person’s proper relationship with others, we must turn to thinkers who give dependency its due.
Articles
First Things - October 2016 issue / October 19, 2016
Is Hellerstedt this Generation’s Roe?
Erika Bachiochi
There is no question that the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt is a win for abortion clinics and their doctors. Whether the decision is a victory for women and for liberty, we ought not be so sure.
Articles
SCOTUSblog / June 28, 2016
Rendering the Sexed Body Legally Invisible: How Transgender Law Hurts Women
Erika Bachiochi
The gross misappropriation of executive power to utterly remake the meaning of very basic legal terms threatens not only the structure of our government, it threatens the rule of law itself. This distortion of legal language is a particular threat to laws concerning women.
Articles
The Public Discourse / May 26, 2016
Abortion and the Supreme Court’s Misguided Notions of ‘Autonomy’
Erika Bachiochi
It is high time that the Court abandon the fiction that abortion serves women’s dignity and equality.
Articles
National Review Online / March 1, 2016
A Matter of Interpretation
Erika Bachiochi
As the nation grieves the passing of a great jurist, it’s worth taking a close look at the precise contours of Justice Scalia’s towering contribution to statutory and constitutional interpretation.
Articles
Mirror of Justice / February 17, 2016
Feminism and Abortion: What Would Susan Say?
Erika Bachiochi
Equality arguments for abortion rights are so commonplace today that perhaps we don’t see the tragic ironies as our forbearers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, would have seen them. The suffragists presumed that the evil of abortion would be abolished by the elevation of women; today’s feminists assert that women’s elevated status depends upon the right to sacrifice the vulnerable.
Articles
New Boston Post / January 25, 2016
Just Like a Woman
Erika Bachiochi
The quest for sexual autonomy has hardly been the boon for women most pro-choice feminists seem to think. A genuinely feminist sexual ethic is needed, one that doesn’t reduce women to biologically challenged men.
Articles
Claremont Review of Books - November 2015 issue / October 19, 2015