Nancy Northup decided when she was very young to become a lawyer. There was no wavering or second thoughts about this choice. She seemed to know intuitively that such training and knowledge could be useful in what she hoped to do. The law could be a means to address social issues such as equal rights and political reform. Nancy links her professional choices to a lifetime membership in the Unitarian Church. She fully subscribes to liberal Unitarian-Universalists precepts and values. One could say she lives her faith. Equality and dignity for all people is a theme repeated often in her conversation. She has always been on the side and worked for the betterment of the “marginalized” and “under-represented.”

Nancy is President of the Center for Reproductive Rights and has been the non-profit’s driving force and key strategist since 2003. The Center has a large cadre of lawyers who bring a wide range of cases to a multitude of state, federal and international courts. One important and recent success was before the United Nations Human Rights Committee. It was the first time the committee formally considered a position on abortion. Following the Center’s presentation, the UN Committee declared, “Access to abortion, where legal, is a basic human right.” The Center for Reproductive Rights addresses all aspects of reproductive life from sexuality education, the right to privacy and easy access to contraception, appropriate, reliable medical care and all other issues revolving around individual autonomy and dignity. The Center generates and dispenses a vast array of educational publications and workshop materials and has created a remarkably informative website for the general public and professionals. It has representatives in Washington, DC who lobby Congress to promote the Center’s goals and additional representatives abroad who where possible, lobby similarly. Since the Center was founded 15 years ago, an expanding network of professional women’s rights advocates in 45 countries is being trained by the Center in human rights law and litigation.

Recently, The Center for Reproductive Rights has been successful in many actions against US government agencies. For example, the Center’s legal team won a suit against the Food and Drug Administration for failure to put into legislation that all drugstores must have emergency contraception, familiarly known as the day-after pill, available over-the-counter without prescription. This year, the Center argued a case before the Supreme Court, Gonzales v. Carhart, challenging a proposed federal ban on abortion.

In 1996, before joining the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy founded the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Among the issues of primary concern were electoral reform, voting rights and campaign finance reform. She was Director of the Program for six years and remains adjunct professor at the NYU Law School and at Columbia University School of Law, teaching constitutional and human rights law. With the same foresight and initiative Nancy exhibited in establishing the Democracy Program, She teaches a ground-breaking seminar at Columbia University Law School, her alma mater, titled “Reproductive Health and Human Rights.” Her hope is to find time one day to write a casebook on the subject to encourage other law schools to incorporate the study into their curricula.

In 2000, Nancy was lead counsel in an action against the State of Florida. Representing 600,000 ex-felons in Florida who “fully served their sentences and yet were still denied the right to vote.” Although the case was not decided in her favor, the action brought considerable attention to the issue. It also exposed “the enormous racially discriminatory impact of the law. Just this year the new governor of Florida changed the law to restore to most ex-felons the right to vote.” One can speculate on the difference such a huge number of votes could make in any election [Editor’s note]. Nancy commented briefly on campaign finance reform. “The relationship between capitalism and democracy in our country’s two party system is not a new question. It was a hotly debated topic in the nineteenth century and will take more time to address.”

Nancy became an active member of NOW (National Organization of Women) while she attended Brown University, where she graduated Magna cum Laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Her major course of study was American History with a focus on religious history and social change movements. One of Nancy’s role models is Bella Abzug, the outspoken and courageous lawyer who was a 3-term US Congresswoman from New York, a mayoral and US Senate candidate and noted women’s rights activist, who also was a graduate of Columbia Law School.

In law school, Nancy furthered a distinguished academic record and was Managing Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. Following law school, Nancy was appointed law clerk to the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. Why Louisiana? It may have been because at the time there were a number of Civil Rights cases in the state courts. From 1989 to 1996, she was a prosecutor and Deputy Chief of Appeals in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, a highly prized appointment for young attorneys.

In 1996, while establishing the Democracy Program, Nancy was also a consulting attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. Her breadth of experience in the practice of law and her academic credentials were enticing to prestigious New York law firms and international corporations where the earning potential are greater. Nancy rejected all of these offers in favor of social advocacy in the non-profit sector.

Nancy can speak with authority on different Unitarian services on the East and West coasts of the United States. Born in Kokomo, Indiana, her father’s position as an executive of the Mobil Chemical Company required periodic re-locations. She grew up mainly in Rochester, New York, although during her early years, the family lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the family attended All Souls and Nancy attended the preschool. It is interesting to note that Nancy attended a nursery school in East Harlem and in kindergarten, P.S. 190. Along the way, the family attended the Unitarian Church in Woodland, California for a few years and although they lived for a while in Temple, Texas, there was no Unitarian Church nearby. At Brown, Nancy attended the Unitarian Church in Providence, Rhode Island. Her sister, who lives in Danbury, Connecticut, attends the Westport Unitarian Church and on occasion, Nancy joins her. Nancy remarked that her Unitarian parents conveyed their liberal views without being outright activists. However, her mother, a professional social worker, worked at anti-poverty programs and “quietly communicated her values to me. I believe that she was a role model for me too.”

Nancy Northup speaking at a conference with her daughter Natalie at her side.

In 1989, Nancy married Daniel Bergner, a writer. They have two children, Natalie, 15, and Miles, 13. Miles, although quite young, teaches third graders at All Souls in the RE program. For many years, She also volunteered as a teacher in the church school. Nearing completion of her formal religious education at All Souls, Nancy’s daughter decided that she preferred to follow her father’s family’s religious heritage. She is preparing for her bat mitzvah in 2008. “My daughter loves to study religion, as I do” Nancy said. “Currently, I am reading a history of Buddhism.” Natalie enjoys the traditions and observances of Judaism and studying Hebrew.

Nancy is a highly visible advocate for the organization she leads. She is a popular and effective lecturer. She addresses questions thoughtfully, clearly and to the point. She has appeared on all the major nightly television network news programs and is frequently quoted and interviewed by the national press. The New York Times published an essay Nancy recently wrote in which she expresses her goals for the Center and also points out that the US Constitution is one of the world’s first human rights documents. In summing up her short and long-term goals for the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy said, “I’d like to change the thinking in this country and around the world to secure broad acceptance that reproductive rights encompass a wide range of issues … that are protected as human rights, and thus, governments cannot impose policies driven by religion or culture to violate those rights.” In the short term, “The Center will continue to expose and defeat policies that allow ideology to trump science. … We will also vigorously fight on the state and federal level, in the courts and legislatures, to protect the right to abortion.”