Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship Annual Lecture
"Garrett Hardin and the Untold History of Abortion and Population Control"
Join us for a virtual lecture by the 2023 Kenneth Karmiole Research Fellow, Lina-Maria Murillo, who used primary sources materials from the Library's Special Research Collections to create her most recent body of scholarship on Garrett Hardin.
Garrett Hardin was a UC Santa Barbara ecologist who, in 1963, began to openly champion liberalizing abortion laws. According to some historians, he was the first to openly advocate for women to have the choice over the procedure, rather than leaving the decision to doctors and politicians in the years before Roe v. Wade. Less is known, however, about Hardin’s philosophy on abortion access and his “woman-centered” approach. This lecture begins to untangle Hardin’s ardent support for women’s unfettered access to abortion and his ideas about population control via reproductive coercion, and his increasing xenophobic ideology that tied his population control activism to white supremacists.
