Erika Bachiochi

Fellow

EPPC 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 also the editor-in-chief of Fairer Disputations, the online journal of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at ASU. She is a 2024–25 Fellow at the Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) where she is teaching a women’s history course in UST’s new Catholic Women and Gender Studies Program.

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EPPC 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 also the editor-in-chief of Fairer Disputations, the online journal of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at ASU. She is a 2024–25 Fellow at the Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) where she is teaching a women’s history course in UST’s new Catholic Women and Gender Studies Program.

A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, she is also a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA, where she founded the Wollstonecraft Project. Her latest 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.

Ms. Bachiochi’s essays have appeared in publications such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public PolicyChristian Bioethics (Oxford University), The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, First Things, American Compass, CNN.com, National Review OnlineNational AffairsClaremont Review of Books, SCOTUSblog, and Public Discourse. She is 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).

Ms. Bachiochi serves on the Advisory Boards/Councils of the Moral Ecology Trust at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA; 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 and serves on the Board of Trustees at Montrose School.

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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

It’s Feminist to be Against Abortion

Erika Bachiochi

Abortion betrays women by having us believe that we must become like men — that is, not pregnant — to achieve parity with them, professionally, socially, educationally.

Articles

CNN.com / January 22, 2015