Marcela Trocha
Collage, in celebration of Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, March 10, 2022
Translations of the Polish words and phrases:
Miłości = love
Tolerancja = tolerance
Rewolucja jest kobieta = revolution is a woman
Partyzantka aborcyjna = abortion activist
Ciche bohaterki = quiet heroes
Wolność = freedom
“I feel […] it’s hard to be ‘good’ these days, settling for okay and hoping things get slightly better. I’m convinced when spring comes, we’ll all feel a bit more positive (or so I hope).
On the bright side – the Art and Appreciation Project provides me so much joy and deepens my appreciation for abortion providers and those who fight for abortion access, and I look forward to it every day.“
– Marcela Trocha, MSc Global Health (she/her), MS3, Poznan University of Medical Sciences; AMSA Sexual Health Scholars Program Course co-Director
With Gratitude and Admiration from the AMSA Reproductive Health Project
Dear Beloved Abortion Providers,
Today being March 10, 2022, we write to you in recognition and celebration of Abortion Provider Appreciation Day. Today and every day – but today in particular – we raise our hearts, hands, and voices to lift you up and hold you with so much love, so much gratitude, and so much appreciation for the care and service that you provide for those who need abortion care, wherever and whenever. We know that you do not do this work tirelessly – you are indeed magical, and yet you are also very much human – and we know that you provide abortion care in the midst of significant and growing risk to your safety, which certainly exacts a toll on you. Our wish for you, today, is that your cup is filled and refilled to overflowing with joy. Our dream for you, today, is that you are carried weightlessly on a gentle river of luscious pure Love. Our incantation for you, today, is for holy rest for the continuation of your sacred work. In every human language that was and is and will be, and for as long as humans will get pregnant and need abortion care, we give thanks to you and for you.
We are grateful for the whole heartedness with which you provide or seek to provide just, loving, supportive, affirming, life-giving care. We have seen and witnessed the strength of your moral conviction to provide this care in spite of so much coordinated effort to demonize and terrorize people who provide abortions and people who have abortions. We have been moved by the fierceness with which you protect each other, champion each other, and most of all, fight for people’s right to determine their own reproductive destinies.
The AMSA Reproductive Health Project team – on behalf of the thousands of premedical and medical students and alumni who constitute the AMSA community – joins friends, family, colleagues, allies, and co-conspirators to lift up and stand alongside you, beloveds, who provide abortion care today and you, beloveds, who will provide abortion care tomorrow. Our work is in support of premedical and medical students who intend to provide abortion care as part of their clinical practices, and we consider ourselves so lucky to get to engage with so many amazing humans who are on their own (and collective) journeys in and through the landscape of reproductive health, rights, and justice. On this day, we honor the life and legacy of care of Dr. David Gunn, who inspires us in our work. We remember him and invoke his name to embolden us in our passionate mission of supporting the next generation of abortion providers. It is with deep humility and care that we seek to nurture tomorrow’s abortion providers, knowing full well that this work will always be necessary.
We celebrate our partners in this work – first and foremost the students themselves, who are energized to take up the call to the work of reproductive justice. These young people – such as third year medical student, Marcela Trocha, who created the beautiful and moving collage that opens this letter – inspire us by their moral imagination, and invite us to explore more deeply with them a vision of a world radically transformed. Among the many associations that represent medical students, today we want to recognize and celebrate Medical Students for Choice (MSFC), a special organization of students dedicated to creating tomorrow’s abortion providers and pro-choice physicians. The AMSA Reproductive Health Project stands in solidarity with MSFC. We honor your work and count ourselves fortunate to get to do this work alongside you.
We celebrate our many other partners in this work: the numerous organizations that nurture students and trainees at each and every stage of their professional development – like the Ryan Program and RHEDI; the organizations that provide politicized education, advocacy training and support – like the Midwest Access Project and Physicians for Reproductive Health; the networks of Reproductive Justice visionaries, leaders, and organizations – like Sistersong, SPARK Reproductive Justice Now!, Indigenous Women Rising, and Changing Woman Initiative; the national and local abortion clinics – like CHOICES Memphis Center for Reproductive Health and all independent abortion clinics, and of course, Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the US; the countless organizations that each work on the interrelated issues of economic justice, environmental justice, housing and food justice, voter rights, legislative reform, and most critical of all the abolition of white supremacy, capitalism, and the imperial-carceral state.
In recognition of this special day, and in honor of those whom this day is intended to honor, we commit ourselves to serving, nurturing, and growing the next generation of abortion providers while also serving, supporting, and advocating for today’s abortion providers. Because of the service of care that you commit yourselves to, we commit ourselves to doing all that we can to ensure that those who are in need of abortion care, can get the care they need, wherever and whenever it is needed.
The AMSA Reproductive Health Project reaffirms our commitment to:
- Advance liberatory medical education informed by the justice and human rights framework of Reproductive Justice
- Advocate for increased coverage of abortion care and family planning in undergraduate medical education (UME)
- Fight for legislative protection of the right to access abortion care whenever it is needed at any point in pregnancy
- Fight for elimination of federally imposed restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion care, pregnancy options counseling, or international abortion access advocacy
- Strengthen and deepen our interorganizational and inter-movement collaboration to build durable power for lasting social change
- Disrupt and defend against threatened and actual violence and terrorist activities directed against individual abortion providers, against people seeking abortion care, and against abortion clinics
- Contribute meaningfully to developing and equipping the current and next generations of activist physicians who will fiercely defend the right of all humans to have autonomous control of their reproductive decisions and destinies
- Center the lived experiences of those who are the targets of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal social domination and control, especially those who have experienced violence and/or violation against their reproductive agency, autonomy, and bodily integrity
- Follow the moral vision and leadership of Black and Indigenous women/femme/queer people, and women/femme/queer people of cultures constituting the Global Majority
- Put our efforts toward delegitimizing, destabilizing, and dismantling white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy
- Join in the call to hold the profession of medicine to accountability for its historical and ongoing racism, including anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and western chauvinism; its historical and ongoing misogyny and misogynoir; its historical and ongoing transphobia and transmisogyny; its historical and ongoing ableism and eugenicist orientation; its historical and ongoing classism and collusion with capitalism; its historical and ongoing abuses of power and manifestation of carceral logic
Today, we celebrate our belonging together in the movement for abortion justice. Collectively, we catch our breath, we fill our cups, we lift our spirits; we express our appreciation and love for you, dear abortion providers. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the days after that, we fight – with you and for you – to protect and expand the right to free and unrestricted abortion care for anyone who needs it, wherever and whenever.
As we conclude this letter of love, we leave you with a benediction – a good word – for the manifestation of a transformed world: may our individual and collective work today give rise to a new world tomorrow, a world in which all humans can thrive and discover their purpose, and be at home on lands healed and nourished by the reign of reproductive justice.
With hearts bursting with Love, Gratitude, and Appreciation; and in solidarity toward justice,
The AMSA Reproductive Health Project
Aliye Runyan, MD
Jeffrey Koetje, MD
Becky Martin
Sujeily Villegas
