Shortly after, in 2018, she helped litigate against the anti-abortion advocates bringing Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization, the case that ultimately resulted in Roe v. Wade\u2019s reversal in 2022, when it was at the district court level.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn that moment, I just understood that the fight around abortion and reproductive rights was \u2026 about our bodily autonomy, our choice, our roles in the world, how a woman\u2019s body is treated as property,\u201d Birnbaum said of her time working on those matters for firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP. \u201cIt\u2019s very interesting to be at a forefront area of the law. I was just so fired up. I decided, \u2018This is what I\u2019m focusing on.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since then, she\u2019s been an integral part of the push for the passage of state-level Shield Laws \u2013 which permit healthcare providers in states where abortion is legal to provide telehealth care and ship abortion pills to people in states where it isn\u2019t \u2013 across the nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so inspiring and interesting to be in the rooms with these legal scholars, people from all corners of the law, getting their feedback,\u201d Birnbaum said of what the early days of working on Shield Laws looked like. \u201cAll of these people were weaving together all these different areas of knowledge to get a sound basis of, \u2018Is this constitutional? What are the holes in the arguments? Where will this make sense? What are the protections? How can we make sure that the max amount of protections are passed? How do we build this thing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/image002-2.jpg\" "\\"NYC")
Natalie Birnbaum, an attorney who\u2019s been working on reproductive rights lawerying for nearly a decade.Photo provided by Natalie Birnbaum<\/p>\n
That work, she said, is ongoing and critical as she and her team await a decision on whether those laws will be challenged in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and is informed by her work on telemedicine matters at healthcare firms like Nixon Law Group and Nelson Hardiman LLP.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It also intersects with her work advising telehealth providers across the country on how to comply with those laws when providing abortion care to people within the legal lines in a fraught landscape, something she\u2019s been doing at her firm Repro Solutions and others, like the Reproductive Health Institute for Telehealth Equity Solutions, where she\u2019s working in a more policy-centered space on the issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The motivation behind Repro Solutions<\/p>\n
Birnbaum said she was motivated to open Repro Solutions to advise reproductive health providers on offering telehealth care and mailed abortion pills to patients under Shield Laws because, as an attorney deeply involved in the fight to get them passed, she was one of the only lawyers familiar enough with the law to provide the legal service to clinics on how to actually comply with and use them to get people care who needed it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the August after Dobbs, and I started working on the New York Shield Law and then got connected with the providers that were really championing getting these Shield Laws passed, and then I started working with California providers,\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cThen these laws passed, and there were providers who said, \u2018Okay, now we want to structure our clinics in a legally compliant way under the Shield Law.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere weren\u2019t a lot of lawyers that were familiar enough with the Shield Law to feel comfortable advising clients and say, \u2018In the state of California it is legal, and it is protected for you to mail [abortion] pills through a telehealth visit into another state,\u2019\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cIt was this new thing, and there weren\u2019t a lot of lawyers in the space. One of my clients I did policy advocacy with in California was like, Hey, will you help us build out our structure?\u2019 I said, \u201cYeah, I can do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791808208_274_image003.jpg\" "\\"NYC")
Birnbaum speaking at a Planned Parenthood event.Photo provided by Natalie Birnbaum<\/p>\n
Advising clinics on complying with telemedicine laws was something she\u2019d been doing at other healthcare firms; she just hadn\u2019t necessarily applied that skill in the same way in the reproductive space, Birnbaum.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started that work for that clinic, and then like other folks came to me that had Shield Law questions, or telehealth practices, or clinics that wanted to integrate telehealth, and I just started doing that,\u201d Birnbaum said.<\/p>\n
Her decision to form the Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights Bar Association was also born from a similar sense that there was a gap that needed filling. After Donald Trump was elected president for the second time in 2020, Birnbaum said she was contacted by a clinic that wanted to close its doors due to the combative landscape they anticipated experiencing. She was upset and feeling alone, she said, and wanted a way to bounce ideas off of and seek support with her colleagues\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really craving that in that moment. I was thinking, \u2018I know that there are other healthcare attorneys that are not at the big places, like Planned Parenthood, that are local healthcare attorneys and clients are going to them right now and being like, \u2018What should we do?\u2019\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018I want to talk to them. Why can\u2019t I talk to them? I know that they want to talk to me too. Where are they?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI decided, I\u2019m just going to do it. I\u2019m going to create a way for us to be communicating with each other,\u201d Birnbaum said.\n<\/p>\n
She reached out to fellow attorneys in the space, received a positive response and launched the bar association in 2025. It\u2019s been incredibly necessary, she said, and has given attorneys a space to share information with each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have in one of our communication platforms, where one lawyer said, \u2018I need to connect with somebody over here in this state about this. Does anybody know anyone? And then someone answers, and it\u2019s just building those networks because finding a repro-friendly lawyer in a certain state and a certain issue area can be hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving people in real time answer each other or share information is great, and we\u2019ve seen it play out through greater ease and efficiency and collaboration,\u201d Birnbaum said, \u201cAnother thing we\u2019ve been doing is policy programming to raise awareness about different issue areas. From that, some folks have gone on to do collaborations with other organizations they didn\u2019t know about before.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/image004.jpg\" "\\"NYC")
Birnbaum stands with her Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights Bar Association co-founder, Melissa Torres-Montoya.Photo provided by Natalie Birnbaum<\/p>\n
Her decision to pour her time into growing the organization is representative of her persistence in working in both the advocacy and more direct lawyering space of reproductive rights. It\u2019s an intentional choice to work on both sides of things, Birnbaum said, because it gives her efforts to push abortion rights forward the advantage of being incredibly informed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes for effective lawyering when you\u2019re working in an issue area to do both sides \u2013 to do the policy side and to do the direct lawyering side,\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cWhen litigation does come up, having the knowledge and the breadth of knowledge of who supported the law that you then have to defend your client under and what the process of developing it looked like is helpful because you\u2019ve already explored and exhausted to an extent the holes or flaws in a law.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd, in my direct client work, when I can see what a provider is experiencing on the ground in terms of their challenges or what they need, then I\u2019m a better advocate on the legislative policy level because I\u2019m like, \u2018If we word the law like this, it\u2019s not actually getting to the root of the problem of the population we\u2019re seeking to protect or support,\u2019\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cWhereas if you\u2019re more removed from that person and what\u2019s happening on the ground, things may sound really good, but you may not be able to have that same understanding of the practical impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
That deep knowledge is also critical to success when you\u2019re working at the forefront of an actively developing legal landscape, Birnbaum said.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very exciting, and it\u2019s challenging, and there\u2019s a lot of balancing that needs to happen when you\u2019re working in such a high-risk area of law,\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cBeing at a new frontier of an area of law requires balancing between, \u2018Okay, this is what I think, and here\u2019s where I\u2019m going to push it. And here\u2019s where there\u2019s legal precedent.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Birnbaum says she now sees her role as an attorney in this fight as one of a person who can offer level judgment on exactly how and where to push advocacy efforts while supporting clinics in complying with ever-contested state laws to legally provide abortion care and supporting other attorneys in doing the same. She also sees it as aligning with her initial reason for wanting to seek out a career in law.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was drawn to law because I had an orientation towards wanting to make the world a better place,\u201d Birnbaum said. \u201cI wanted to use tools in order to improve people\u2019s lives and circumstances.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, I find, particularly being in an area of law that\u2019s on the frontier, in a moment where historically we\u2019re on the precipice of a whole new world, it feels like our sound judgment, our balanced judgment is so important,\u201d Birnbaum added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The nationwide Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights Bar Association exists because New York City-based attorney Natalie Birnbaum saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11078,2710,9,11,10,20090,136820,136821],"class_list":["post-370938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-abortion","tag-law","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-profiles","tag-reproductive-rights","tag-sexual-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}