Sara L. Ainsworth, J.D., is Chief Legal & Policy Director at If/When/How, where she supports and oversees a 25-person team of litigators, legal services lawyers, researchers, network builders, and policy advocates. Sara has spent more than a decade defending people who have been criminalized for having a self-managed abortion, or experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth. Her primary expertise in criminal defense cases is as appellate counsel, client counseling, and trial support to build the record for appeal. Sara also leads If/When/How’s civil rights litigation to advance the individual rights of people who have been criminalized and to ensure reproductive freedom. She has many years of experience advocating for civil, noncarceral protections for survivors of intimate partner violence in the courts and in legislatures, including defending survivors from the family policing system's intervention in their relationships with their children. A key focus of her policy work at If/When/How is on the passage of state laws that prohibit the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes and repeal of archaic statutes misapplied to criminalize people’s reproductive lives.

Prior to joining If/When/How, Sara was Advocacy Director at Legal Voice, a women’s and LGBTQ rights organization in the Pacific Northwest. She also worked at National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now Pregnancy Justice), and taught Poverty Law, Gender Violence & the Law, and Reproductive Rights & Social Justice, as a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Law. As a Visiting Assistant Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Seattle University School of Law, Sara taught the Domestic Violence Clinic, supervising law students representing immigrant survivors of intimate partner violence in U Visa cases. Sara was a co-founding board member of Surge Reproductive Justice, a nonprofit working for reproductive and racial justice in Washington state, and is a volunteer attorney at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. She is a graduate of the University of Washington School of Law, a lifelong Seattleite, and the mother of two. 

In Spring of 2026, the University of Colorado Law Review will publish Sara's article, co-authored with Professor Leigh Goodmark, addressing the importance of intimate partner violence evidence in defending people criminalized for self-managed abortion or pregnancy loss.