About Us

Rachael N. Pine

Executive Vice President and Director, Program Division

Rachael N. Pine is an attorney with a distinguished history in non-profit management, program development, national impact litigation, and advocacy. Her focus has been the promotion of policies and programs that improve access to health services and choices in low-resource settings, including in the developing world. 

Immediately before joining Legal Momentum as executive vice president and director of its program division in 2009, she served from 2004-08 as the first executive director of the Fund for Public Health in New York (FPHNY). FPHNY is a non-profit organization working independently and in partnership with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) to enhance innovation, impact, and efficiency in public health with private sector resources.  Pine led FPHNY through and beyond its start-up phase to become a permanent and growing organizational presence in the NYC non-profit public health landscape. Its programs included: cancer screening in NYC’s poorest urban neighborhoods, analysis of health disparities, nurse home visiting supporting first-time high-risk mothers and children, screening for sexually transmitted disease, and an ambitious plan to strengthen reproductive health in NYC school-based clinics on a large scale.

Before assuming the leadership of FPHNY, Pine worked in the field of international reproductive health and human rights from 1992-2004. At EngenderHealth from 1996-2004, she served as vice president for public affairs and as a member of the executive team, overseeing public policy, government relations, communications, and marketing. She helped manage the strategic re-branding and re-direction of the organization’s programs, conceived and managed special initiatives including an international working group on informed choice in family planning and the successful positioning of the organization for a global U. N. award. Before moving to EngenderHealth, Pine was director of the International Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights from its inception in 1992 until 1996, during which time she built a precedent-setting U.S. human rights advocacy program dedicated to working with developing country partner organizations to promote access to health care and reproductive rights as a human right.

 

From 1985 through 1992, Pine was a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project where she brought challenges to state and federal laws, policies, and regulations seeking to advance privacy, free speech, and equality rights for women and girls, with a particular emphasis on those in marginalized communities.  She was counsel of record in Rust v. Sullivan through to the U.S. Supreme Court and was among the lead lawyers in Hodgson v. Minnesota beginning with a six-week trial and continuing to the Supreme Court. She litigated cases in Mississippi, Minnesota, New York, Louisiana, and Utah, and served as an expert resource to attorneys and journalists nationwide. 

Pine has twenty years of experience advocating for women’s health, civil liberties, and human rights and more than 12 years of experience conceiving, developing, and managing programs and mission-driven organizations.  She has spoken and published widely in her areas of expertise and is considered a leading expert on the laws and policies that affect access to reproductive health care both in the U.S. and abroad. Pine is a 1983 graduate of New York University School of Law and served as a law clerk for two years in the U.S. District Court in New Jersey.