Lynn is the founder and Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), a nonprofit that advances the human and civil rights, health and welfare of women using a combination of legal advocacy, public education, grassroots and national organizing. NAPW focuses particularly on pregnant and parenting women, and those who are most vulnerable to state control and punishment – low-income women, women of color, and drug-using women. Ms. Paltrow has worked on numerous cases challenging restrictions on the right to choose abortion as well as cases opposing the prosecution and punishment of pregnant women seeking to continue their pregnancies to term.

Widely recognized as a thought leader and change agent in the struggle for reproductive justice, Lynn has received many honors including a Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship; The Drug Policy Alliance’s Justice Gerald Le Dain Award for Achievement in the Field of Law, and an honorary Doctor of Law degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has welcomed opportunities to explain her work on PBS Moyers & Company for a segment on “Abortion Rights Activism” and on NPR’s Fresh Air segment addressing “Personhood In The Womb: A Constitutional Question.”

Before founding NAPW in 2001, Ms. Paltrow served as a senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, as Director of Special Litigation at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and as VP for Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood of NYC.

Lynn is a graduate of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and the NYU School of Law. She quips that she might just have been confused about the word “labor” in ILR but, as an advocate for reproductive justice, she believes that the struggle for women’s reproductive rights is inextricably linked to the struggle for labor, economic, and human rights. Lynn is a Gemini and the mother of twins.

At the time of our 40th Reunion, Lynn is proud that the work of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the organization she founded and directs, was recognized in an 8-part New York Times special opinion report on January 20, 2019 entitled 'A Woman’s Rights'.