Dr. April Shaw is a staff attorney at the Network’s Northern Region Office. She previously served as a Research Scholar at the Center for Public Health Law & Policy at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and as a staff attorney for the Network’s Western Region. She has worked as an attorney at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and, prior to that, as a senior law clerk at the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One. Before entering the legal field, April was a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. April received her J.D. with distinction from the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in 2015. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2010, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women & Gender Studies. Her research interests include gender justice, racial justice, and reproductive rights. Her article on how state statutes prohibiting race- and sex-selective abortions employ longstanding racial stereotypes to place greater, and unwarranted, scrutiny on women of color who exercise their reproductive rights won the Sarah Weddington Writing Prize for New Student Scholarship in Reproductive Rights Law.

Articles & Resources

Systemic Racism and Policing: How Can Public Health Advocates Grapple with the Dual Challenges of Systemic Racism and Discriminatory Policing?

Issue BriefMechanisms for Advancing Public Health

July 30, 2020
by April Shaw

Following the killing of George Floyd, localities have increasingly declared racism to be a public health emergency or crisis. Despite growing recognition of the fact that racism is a key contributor to poor health in communities of color, there is still insufficient attention to the role of policing and systemic racism as institutions that have powerful impacts on the health and well-being of people of color. This issue brief provides an assessment of how structural racism and policing function as critical social determinants of health for Black people and people of color generally.

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Women’s Health at Risk: How the Title X Final Rule Will Impact Poor and Low-Income Women

Law & Policy InsightsHealth Reform

November 7, 2019
by April Shaw

Title X is the only federally funded program for low-income patients exclusively dedicated to providing family planning and preventative services, including contraception and screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer and STDs. Title X serves some four million people a year, most of them women. However, recent rule changes threaten to severely limit women’s access to these essential services.

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