We are elated to announce that Dr. Jacqueline Harvey Abernathy has accepted the new role of Senior Research and Development Fellow here at the Society of Saint Sebastian. As a former graduate professor, Dr. Abernathy will be enabling our scholarly research efforts by helping secure vital grant funding for the Society and its membership. She has successfully advanced the pro-life movement for over two decades, primarily in regards to public policy, but has also procured millions of dollars in grant awards that she drafted and won for various non-profit organizations throughout her lengthy consulting career. She intends to pursue these opportunities to fund our mission and the work of our many fellows and associates while continuing her existing research studies. 

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We are pleased to welcome her back to a leadership role with us, as she previously served on our Board of Directors from 2017-2020. In this new position, she will also be taking a key editorial role managing manuscript submissions and review for our flagship publication, The Journal Bioethics in Law & Culture as well as contributing commentary for our online blog Sebastian’s Point. Dr. Abernathy is ideally suited for this new position from both a pragmatic and pro-life perspective. She has expertise and extensive experience with academic publishing as an author and referee plus years of knowledge about procuring vital grant funding, but is best known as a pro-life advocate and academic. Her legislative work started when she graduated university 2003 and immediately began shaping policy on both prenatal and end-of-life issues, for example, protecting unborn victims of violent assault with the Texas Prenatal Protection Act to restoring food and water via tube feeding to persons with disabilities like Terri Schindler Schiavo with Florida’s “Terri’s Law.” Her involvement with Terri’s battle during her graduate studies in Social Work inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. in Public Administration and ultimately reform the Texas Advance Directives Act to ensure that feeding tubes could no longer be removed without patient or family consent. She has also been intimately involved in the legal defense of vital abortion restrictions and conscience rights of pro-life advocates, from research submitted via amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2014 Hobby Lobby case to serving as expert witness for Attys General in several U.S. states to defend pro-life laws from abortion industry lawsuits levied by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU before the fall of Roe v. Wade. Dr. Abernathy has also testified as an expert witness regarding her 2016 abortion research in Ontario, Canada where she and her family recently relocated so she could update that study and continue to work against the ever-growing acceptance euthanasia among Canadians and the absence of laws to protect the vulnerable. 

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Dr. Abernathy stepped down from her position on our board to focus more on her research, and during that six-year sabbatical during she continued to work as a graduate public administration professor, published peer-reviewed studies on assisted suicide laws, conducted suicide prevention research for the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, ran as consistently pro-life candidate for Texas governor in 2022, and testified on pro-life legislation nationwide. We are excited about her return to our Society and are eager to see what new opportunities and projects she will lead now as our Senior Research and Development Fellow.