Letter to the AMS: A call to defend bodily autonomy in the mathematics community 

The Supreme Court of the United States decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday, June 24, 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade has a profound impact on the rights of members of our community. We stand with everyone whose rights to medical care including abortions, bodily autonomy, and privacy this reactionary decision attacks.

This decision follows on the heels of escalating attacks on the bodily autonomy of trans people in many states across the US as evidenced by the landslide of recent legislation aimed at denying healthcare, especially gender affirming care, to trans children and adults. Furthermore, Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion makes clear that these assaults on civil liberties will continue and broaden, leaving us all at risk of losing natural protections for privacy and autonomy in our personal lives and for our personhoods. 

As mathematicians, we are deeply concerned by the impact these rulings will have on many people in our mathematical community who already face a lack of support for their bodily autonomy, including their family planning decisions as well as their access to healthcare, medical leave, and parental support.  Moreover, too many mathematics departments are flat out hostile to pregnant people, new parents, and trans people, for instance by denying them parental and/or medical leave.  This insufficient support and hostility are exacerbated for people in our community in contingent or non-tenure track positions, such as graduate students, postdocs, non-tenure track faculty, and staff, as well as those already oppressed along multiple axes, for example race, gender, sexuality, religious affiliation, ability, or size.  We emphasize the entwined nature of these issues, as well as our belief that mathematics departments across the US can and must do more to build structures that support the bodily autonomy and other rights of all of their community members, including their transgender students and faculty; those who are pregnant or have children; Black and Indigenous students and faculty; disabled members of their department; and women. Supporting these mathematicians is supporting mathematicians, which is supporting mathematics, which is the goal of a mathematics department.

In the context of the new attacks on reproductive rights and transgender care rights we call on mathematics departments to adopt the following protocol to ensure that anyone needing abortion care and/or trans affirming care can access it, especially when their parent institutions are not providing these resources. Many of these asks coincide with the broader goal of making mathematics departments more accessible and welcoming to all people and all their types of bodies:

1) Two weeks of medical leave, no questions asked, per academic term.

2) Accessible gender neutral bathrooms, with changing stations, in all of our departments and meeting venues, as well as rooms to breast/chest feed and pump. 

3) Explicit support and information for anyone looking for abortion and/or trans affirming care.  

4) Parental leave for all department employees including grad students, postdocs, non-tenure track faculty, and staff, with clear written policies. 

5) A standing fund to support departmental members who are in need of financial support for childcare or other services to attend conferences, which funding organizations like the NSF will not support (See Question 6 in this Q&A).

6) Clear and accessible policies for name changes in all departmental contexts, and support of this process in institutional matters.

Some departments may be unable to implement immediately the above actions without institution-wide approval. In those cases, we call on mathematics departments to engage in active, vocal advocacy for these changes within their institutions. We also want to emphasize that the traditional academic trajectory to become a faculty member in mathematics is designed to accommodate able-bodied, cishet white men who have familial and spousal support to accommodate their personal needs, such as having children and raising a family. It is important for departments to examine the ways in which their structures continue to reinforce a culture that punishes child bearers and child rearers, especially in regards to hiring as well as promotion and tenure.

Thus, we have the following further asks:

7) Organize department-wide discussions of this culture within mathematics and how departments and individual mathematicians can work to help dismantle it.

8) Identify concrete steps that can be taken to facilitate change toward a departmental environment that is more accommodating to everyone. These include:

(a) Explicitly acknowledge these issues in formulating hiring, retention, and promotion criteria for all positions, as well as decisions involving graduate students.

(b) Consult with accessibility experts and disability advocacy groups to determine improvements that can be made to physical spaces and resources to address the various accessibility needs of faculty, staff, and students.

We also believe individual mathematicians have a responsibility to act on behalf of the wider community when organizing, speaking at, and attending conferences, as well as visiting colleagues, in states that have restricted access to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare. We ask that individual mathematicians who sign on to this statement commit to the following actions, as applicable:

1) As a conference organizer, commit to a clear statement of support for abortion care and trans rights, and providing a virtual participation option. This latter point is also an important accessibility concern for disabled and immunocomprised people who may face greater risk and/or difficulty in travelling to in-person events. (See the Spectra statement for further suggestions related to conference organization.)

2) As a conference speaker, strongly advocate that any conference to which you are invited offers an option for virtual participation.

3) As a conference attendee or when visiting a colleague, commit to donating to a local abortion fund that supports abortion access in the state where you are visiting. The amount donated is, of course, dependent on individual means. Please keep in mind the difference in percentage of income donated when someone donates $100 with a yearly salary of $25,000 vs. $50,000 vs. $100,000. 

Finally, we are not asking for a blanket boycott of conferences in states where abortion and medical care for trans people have been criminalized, and we do not believe that such boycotts should be implemented without an explicit call from local community organizers. No US state is safe for all marginalized people as the US was built on the genocide and enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples and the legacy of this history is still very much alive today. Conference organizers should be aware and transparent about the risks that participants take on when attending conferences in different locations.

Federico Ardila (San Francisco State University)

Juliette Bruce (Brown University)

Matthew Durham (University of California, Riverside)

Barbara Fantechi (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati)

Mark Hagen (University of Bristol)

Denis Hirschfeldt (University of Chicago)

Marissa Loving (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Seppo Niemi-Colvin (Indiana University Bloomington)

Florencia Orosz Hunziker (University of Denver)

Priyam Patel (University of Utah)

Candice Price (Smith College)

Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins University)

Noelle Sawyer (Southwestern University)