Emily Galpern is a consultant focusing on the intersection of reproductive justice and human biotechnologies. She specializes in policy advocacy, organizational capacity building, and education about assisted reproductive technologies and their impact on the health and rights of women and pregnant people. Emily partners with organizations and scholars in the US and internationally in the fields of reproductive rights and justice, racial justice, disability rights, LGBTQ rights, and Indigenous sovereignty to recognize how the legacies of oppression and eugenics, as well as contemporary forms of injustice, affect people’s lives and advocate together for better policies and practices. Emily has worked as a consultant and non-profit worker for more than 20 years, fighting reproductive oppression and building bridges between social justice movements.
Emma McDonald Kennedy is a consultant for CGS and an Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Villanova University. She received her PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Her research interests include moral agency, social ethics, and contemporary biotechnologies. Her most recent project draws together qualitative methods, critical realist sociology, feminist ethics, and disability studies to examine clinical and ecclesial contexts that shape family formation choices in response to infertility. Her current research scrutinizes emerging reproductive technologies, including polygenic embryo screening and AI assistance in gamete and embryo selection, with particular attentiveness to their impact on conceptualizations of agency and responsibility in clinical settings.
Pete Shanks, MA, attended Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and moved to California in the mid-1970s. He has been active in a range of local and international political movements, while mostly making his living in the publishing industry, especially on the production side; he enjoys the craft of bookmaking. Appalled by the eugenic possibilities of biotechnology, he has consulted with the Center for Genetics and Society since its earliest days. He is the author of Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) and a regular contributor to Biopolitical Times.