This lecture opens the new exhibition, Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States. A public reception follows the event.

Mothers of young children are the fastest-growing population of incarcerated persons in the United States today. Policing practices that target poor women of childbearing age–many of them women of color, most convicted of nonviolent crimes–have halted these women's heterosexual sex lives and reproductive opportunities as effectively as coercive sterilization programs interrupted the fertility of numerous welfare recipients in the 1970s. These practices arguably function as a contemporary extension of population policies embedded in US laws governing slavery and immigration since the 18th century.

The lecture is presented by Rickie Solinger, a historian writing books about reproductive politics, welfare politics, who gets to be a "legitimate mother" in the United States, and the relationships of race and class to this issue. For more than two decades, Solinger has been curating traveling exhibitions about these matters, aiming to "interrupt the curriculum."