Katie Watson is an award-winning Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences, Medical Education, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she has taught bioethics, medical humanities, and constitutional law to medical students and masters students for fifteen years. She is also a lawyer who graduated from NYU School of Law and began her career clerking in the federal judiciary and practicing in public interest law, and in 2017 Watson worked part-time as Senior Counsel to the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project of the ACLU of Illinois. Before she entered academia, she completed an Ethics Fellowship at University of Chicago Medical School’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and a Medical Humanities Fellowship at Northwestern University Medical School’s Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. Professor Watson recently ended a term as a Board member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and she is currently on the Board of the National Abortion Federation, a Member of the National Medical Council of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and on the Editorial Board of the AMA Journal of Ethics.
Her new book, “Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Ordinary Abortion” was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press, and it is the winner of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. The New York Times describes Scarlet A as “revolutionary,” the Hastings Center Report calls it “brilliant … a thought-provoking and thoroughly fresh perspective,” and Conscience Magazine says it is “a pleasure to read. The ideas it contains are complex and subtle, but the writing is direct and honest.”
