Lawrence Lader Lectureship
The Lawrence Lader Lectureship on Family Planning and Reproductive Rights at Harvard Medical School was established by a generous gift from advocate and author Lawrence Lader. The Lader Lecture creates an annual public forum to spotlight the broad range of medical, ethical, social, and scientific issues surrounding human reproduction. The series began in 1997 when Faye Wattleton, former head of Planned Parenthood, spoke on Reproductive Freedom for the 21st Century.
Lawrence Lader has been described by Betty Friedan as the “father of abortion rights.” A 1941 graduate of Harvard College, he was the founding chair of NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. Mr. Lader is a journalist and author of 11 books including Abortion, which was quoted nine times in the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision; The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control, the first published biography of Margaret Sanger; and most recently A Private Matter: RU-486 and the Abortion Crisis. In 1975 he founded Abortion Rights Mobilization, which today is at the center of the struggle to make the French abortion pill RU-486 available to American women.