SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Year-end Reflections in the Season of Sacred Light & Sacred Darkness
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
Season’s greetings from us at the AMSA Reproductive Health Project!
We hope that you are experiencing all that this season of sacred light and sacred darkness (you can’t have the one without the other) offers:
anticipation and joy, resolution and contentment, community and togetherness, solitude and rest,
celebration and festivity, contemplation and reflection, movement and dance,
spaciousness and a sacred pause in the unstoppable passage of time.
This year, 2024, has been a difficult, deadly, tumultuous year – we are living in a difficult, deadly, and tumultuous period of time, not limited to a single year: the horrific and worsening impacts of climate destabilization and ecological collapse; the rise and acceleration of authoritarian, fascistic, and nationalistic political movements; multiple genocides and increasing dehumanization of refugees, migrants, houseless people, and trans people; regressions of human rights, especially women’s rights, children’s rights, and reproductive rights; authoritarian crack-down on youth and campus-based uprisings…I could go on. But I don’t need to, because we already know all of this – we’re living it, in real time. And, we also already know that 2025 will bring with it more of the same – some things we can predict with a high degree of confidence, and other things that we can’t possibly predict.
In the midst of everything that is going on, we face a critically important decision, a choice: will we choose to fight for ourselves,for each other, and for the life we know is possible, or will we abandon ourselves, each other, and the life we know is possible, and give into the nihilism of despair?
One thing we know for certain is that if we decide not to take any actions for ourselves and for each other, then we are absolutely condemning ourselves to the worst possible outcomes for any of the crises we face. This is what despair is, by the way: despair – a complete absence of hope – is a state of inaction, a complete acquiescence to the perceived inevitability of the outcomes we most fear. So, if despair is a state of reactive (non-reflective) inaction, hope is a state of responsive (reflective, intentional) action. Perhaps you’ve heard that hope is not a feeling; it’s a discipline.
“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense.
Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.”
— Mariame Kaba
What I love about this quote is that it helps me understand that I can express hope through action, even if I’m not feeling particularly optimistic or hopeful. Perhaps another way to understand what hope is, is to recognize that the instant we begin to wonder, Could this be different? Could this be better? Be fairer? Be more just? Be more loving?, we have actually moved out of the state of despair and into the action of hope/hoping – even if our feelings haven’t changed all that much! Despair is an existential dead-end! Despair is when we are convinced that there is no way out. Hope posits that there must be many possible ways out – even if all them are “through” (i.e., the only way out is through).
So, how do we in the AMSA Repro Project practice the discipline of hope?
The discipline of hope almost always starts with an outstretched hand, seeking connection and offering connection, in recognition that practices of belonging and building community also construct the bridges that help us pass from despair to hope. In looking back at 2024, we are grateful to each and every one of you who responded to our invitations to join us in this project and in this work. Looking ahead to 2025, we invite you to join us in any of the programs that we offer – whether one of the upcoming Abortion Care and Repro Justice Institutes, or one of our Repro Mentorship Sprints, the Repro Health eNews, or the Repro-related poster presenter scholarship for the Poster Session during AMSA’s 75th annual meeting, Future Physicians for Change.
The discipline of hope is imaginative, creative, fruitful, generative. As Toni Cade Bambara once said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” Through the Repro Project, we nurture in ourselves and in each other the generative capacity to imagine – in detail – the world we dream of creating, and then we begin to manifest that dream in the way that we live, work, and move through the world in our daily lives. Through our morally-imaginative artistry, we strive to make justice-making so pleasurable that it becomes irresistible; through the discipline of our intentional action-taking, we transform (re-create) the world, by first transforming (re-creating) ourselves. To create the Beloved Community, we must become Love embodied and enacted.
The discipline of hope is for something, not just against something. We in the Repro Project aren’t just against abortion restrictions, reproductive injustice, white supremacy, or heteropatriarchy. Now, certainly, we are indeed against these. But more significantly, we are for: the recognition and protection of universal human rights; the values of fairness, justice, equity; the sociopolitical principles of multiracial democracy; the empowering impact of liberatory and love-based pedagogies; the answers and solutions offered through intersectional feminism, queer theory, and abolitionist anti-racism. The world we are dreaming of, and working toward, is built on these principles, values, and socio-political commitments to each other.
The discipline of hope affirms the moral and ethical correctness of the notion, “Nothing about us, without us.” AMSA is a student-led organization for future physicians. We in the Repro Project affirm that we do our work in service and support of the vision for the world that young people are desiring for themselves. We who have been around a bit longer have a duty to help support, nurture, mentor, shepherd, and partner with young people who are coming into a greater awareness and understanding of their voice(s), their agency, and their power. Getting to work with students and young people every day is perhaps the strongest connection to hope that I personally experience! We celebrate the critical eye, keen observances, astute questions, and brilliant creativity of future physicians like Joy Udoh (AMSA Repro Project Fellow) and Araam Abboud (AMSA Repro Project Intern). HUGE kudos and gratitude to both Joy and Araam for their incredible work in co-creating, our current social media campaign on universal human rights, BUILDING CONNECTIONS: 30 Days of Human Rights & Reproductive Justice!
Finally – at least for now – the discipline of hope is in it for the long term, the long game, the long view; the discipline of hope is in it for the generation that will come seven generations from now. We recognize the responsibility that we have to those who will come after us – we recognize that the work we do today creates the conditions that will shape the reality of tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. If we work toward transformation today, we know that a transformed tomorrow becomes much more possible, and ever more likely. The more we live in the present moment in accordance with the kind of future we dream of, the more that dream becomes the present reality, because of course, the future is only ever just a sequence of successive presents.
As we enter 2025, let’s practice the discipline of hope, together. That way, we’ll discover that the darkness we find ourselves surrounded by now, is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb. And that is a sacred darkness of possibility.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #34:
Year-end Reflections, Humor & New Opportunities! Dec 21, 2024
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