Katie Watson, JD, professor of Medical Education, Medical Social Sciences in the Division of Determinants of Health, and of Obstetrics and Gynecology, has been named a 2024 Hastings Center Fellow.
Watson joins a group of more than 300 fellows who are recognized for their outstanding work in informing scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, healthcare, science and technology.
“This is an incredible honor. It’s also a recognition that academic work in reproductive ethics, law, medicine, and justice in the U.S. has never been more important. I’m grateful that being a Hastings Center Fellow will help my work in this area reach an even broader group of national experts, and it will also offer opportunities for me to actively support the other Fellows’ scholarship,” Watson said.
Watson teaches medical ethics, humanities and law to medical students at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and students in Northwestern’s Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics program. She is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Center for Reproductive Science and the Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM).
She received her JD in 1992 from New York University School of Law and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in medical ethics at the University of Chicago in 1999 and a second postdoctoral fellowship in medical humanities and bioethics at Feinberg.
Before joining the Feinberg faculty, Watson clerked in the federal judiciary, worked as an appellate public defender for death row inmates, practiced poverty law at Legal Aid of Chicago, and practiced health law at the firm of Ross & Hardies. In 2017-2018, Watson left Feinberg faculty part-time to serve as senior counsel for the ACLU of Illinois Women’s and Reproductive Rights project.
In bioethics, Watson is best known for her scholarship in abortion ethics, practice and law, and is the author of Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion. Her work has been published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The American Journal of Bioethics, and The New Yorker, and she has been regularly quoted about abortion in top media outlets, including CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Watson has been a member of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Ethics Committee for over 15 years and is currently a board member of the Midwest Access Coalition and a member of the ethics committee of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.
The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization created from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, law, political science and education, was critical to establishing the field of bioethics in 1969 and is the oldest interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in the world.
