| Emily Bazelon | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1971 United States |
| Education | Yale University |
| Occupation | Print and web media writer, essayist |
| Spouse(s) | Paul Sabin |
| Children | Eli Simon |
| Religious belief(s) | Jewish |
| Notable credit(s) | Slate New York Times Magazine |
Emily Bazelon (born 1971) is an American journalist, senior editor for online magazine Slate, and a senior research fellow at Yale Law School. Her work as a writer focuses on law, abortion, and family issues.[1]
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Bazelon is a writer and senior editor of Slate.[1] She has written articles about controversial subjects, such as the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld trial[2] and post-abortion syndrome.[3] Bazelon edits Slate's legal columns, "Jurisprudence", and is co-editor of its blog on women's issues, XX Factor (also known as DoubleX),[4] and regularly appears on The Political Gabfest, a weekly Slate podcast with David Plotz and John Dickerson.
She is also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.[4] Before joining Slate, Bazelon was a senior editor of Legal Affairs.[4] Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, as well as other publications.[4] She has worked as a reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area and, in 1993 and 1994, as a freelance journalist in Israel.[5]
Bazelon is also a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School.[1] Bazelon and former New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse are affiliated with the Law and Media Program of Yale Law School.[6]
Bazelon has written a series on bullying and cyberbullying for Slate, called Bull-E.[7] She has been nominated for the 2011 Michael Kelly Award[8] for her story "What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince?"[9] The three-part article is about the death of a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide in South Hadley, MA in January 2010, and the decision by the local prosecutor to bring criminal charges against six teenagers in connection with this death. The Michael Kelly Award, sponsored by the Atlantic Media Co., "honors a writer or editor whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly's own career: the fearless pursuit and expression of truth."[10] Bazelon's series also sparked heated reaction[11] and a response from D.A. Elizabeth Scheibel [12], who brought the charges against the six teenagers.
Bazelon is working on a book about bullying and school climate for Random House, titled Sticks and Stones.[13]
Much of Bazelon's writing has been strongly critical of the pro-life movement and opponents of legal abortion, including pro-life feminists[14] and proponents of the concept of post-abortion syndrome,[3] while supportive of abortion providers[15] and pro-choice federal judges.[16] She has accused crisis pregnancy centers of being "all about bait-and-switch" and "falsely maligning" the abortion procedure.[17][18] Bazelon has been described by some commentators as "strongly pro-choice"[19] and a "prominent pro-choicer."[20] She has acknowledged her support for legal abortion on her Double X blog, commenting, "of course there's still an argument that access to legal abortion is also crucial to opportunity for women. Think how much some women's lives would constrict if they really had to carry every pregnancy to term."[21]
In July 2009, the New York Times Magazine published Bazelon's interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.[22] Discussing her view of Roe v. Wade in 1973, Ginsburg commented,
Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.
Bazelon did not ask any follow-up question to Ginsburg's suggestion that she subscribes to a eugenics-based rationale for legalized abortion, i.e., as a remedy for "populations that we don't want to have too many of". Bazelon was criticized by some conservative commentators for not doing so. Michael Gerson in the Washington Post asked, "Who, in Ginsburg's statement, is the 'we'? And who, in 1973, was arguing for the eugenic purposes of abortion?"[23] Gerson suggested that Ginsburg was expressing an attitude of some in her "social class" -- that abortion is useful in reducing the number of social undesirables—and noted, "Neither judge nor journalist apparently found this attitude exceptional; there was no follow-up question."[23] Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Jewish World Review, called Bazelon's failure to ask a follow-up question "bizarre."[24] The on-line magazine Politics Daily attributed the lack of a follow-up question to Bazelon's "strongly pro-choice" views, noting that "when an interviewer assumes that he or she shares the subject's sympathies and world view, even the most shocking statements can fly right by, or be assigned the most benign possible meaning."[19]
In response to the criticism, Bazelon said that she did not ask a follow-up question because she believed that Ginsburg's use of "we" had referred to "some people at the time, not [Ginsburg] herself or a group that she feels a part of."[19] Bazelon added that she (Bazelon) is "imperfect".[19] Carl M. Cannon, writing in Politics Daily, dismissed Bazelon's explanation, remarking that it was "hardly the first time prominent pro-choicers have had to engage in semantic gymnastics to obscure a longtime underlying rationale for their position that is neither politically nor morally correct."[20]
Bazelon was raised in Philadelphia and attended Germantown Friends School. She graduated from Yale College in 1993 and from Yale Law School in 2000 and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.[1] After law school she worked as a law clerk for Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Bazelon is the granddaughter of David L. Bazelon, formerly a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,[25] and second cousin twice removed of feminist Betty Friedan.[26] She lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband, Paul Sabin, an assistant professor of history at Yale, and their sons, Eli and Simon.[5][27][28][29][30]