Communities Lara Knudsen '03
Publishing a book about international reproductive rights while still in medical school
When Lara Knudsen was 17 and working at a women's clinic in Portland, Oregon, she became interested in the scope of women's reproductive choices in other cultures. Finding a dearth of literature on the subject she set out to write a book of her own, a project that she began before even arriving at Marlboro. Lara decided to transfer to Marlboro because she was "drawn to the Plan of Concentration and the focus on cross-disciplinary studies. I had a lot of interests that I wanted to combine: African studies, development studies, women's studies, pre-med. There aren't very many schools where you can actually study all those things and tie them together."
As a student in Marlboro's World Studies Program, Lara went on an eight-month internship in Uganda, where she worked in the maternity wing of a rural hospital and served as a research assistant with the World Health Organization. What she learned there contributed directly to her research: "Parts of the book's introduction and most of the chapter on Uganda came straight from my Plan of Concentration," she says.
Lara earned her Marlboro degree in biology and development studies in 2003 and after graduating continued her research, which culminated in Reproductive Rights in a Global Context: South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan, released in June 2006. In the book, Lara explores "the intersections between reproductive rights in these seven countries and highlights commonalities found across borders, in spite of drastically different frameworks."
Lara is currently entering her third year of medical school at George Washington University, and will likely go into family medicine with an emphasis on women's health, working both abroad and in the US.