SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Justice is a Journey; Hope is Each Step We Take in Spite of it All
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
“Jeff, that’s white supremacy thinking; justice is never just one-and-done. It’s always on-going and always returning.
Justice is a journey, not a destination.”
That was exactly the truth I didn’t know I needed to hear in the first full week of 2025.
Last week, my first week back to work after a two week end-of-year break, I was in a conversation with Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, whom I first met a few years ago when she was the Director of Spiritual Care and Activism for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (now the Religious Community for Reproductive Choice). Dr. Cari has spoken several times in various programs of the AMSA Reproductive Health Project, and even co-facilitated a recent in-person retreat for AMSA staff and national student leaders. Since coming to know AMSA through these engagements, she is a passionate supporter and advocate for the work we do as a student-led organization taking action at the intersection of medical education, health justice, and youth-led movement-building for social transformation.
Dr. Cari and I were talking about how we are approaching 2025, and our feelings about what this year will likely bring under the second Trump administration. I said something to the effect that I can’t believe that here we are again, facing renewed threats to and likely regression of human rights and civil liberties under the incoming administration that has pretty clearly demonstrated its intent to undo as much as possible the social progress gained over the past 75+ years in the post-World War period. And then I said, with an exasperated tone, “Didn’t we already fight this fight?!”
And that’s when she laid down the truth, in loving correction,
“Jeff, that’s white supremacy thinking; justice is never just one-and-done.
It’s always on-going and always returning. Justice is a journey, not a destination.”
As soon as her words reached my ears, they went straight to my heart, and I recognized – in that deep, embodied way – that what she was speaking was the kind of truth that has sacred significance, like spoken scripture. (By the way, this is why I seek to surround myself with deeply spiritual and spiritually “tuned-in” people – as much as I seek to surround myself with deep thinkers and deep feelers!)
And of course, she’s correct, both from a historical perspective as well as from a philosophical one. From the historical perspective, we can easily see the long and unbroken chain that connects today’s freedom fighters to the good ancestors of past resistance, freedom, and liberation movements. As my Repro Project colleague, Becky Martin, frequently says,
“We [who are working to advance freedom and justice today] stand on the shoulders of giants
[those who have worked to advance freedom and justice through every period of human existence].
How reassuring – and how relieving – to know that no effort toward freedom, justice, or liberation starts or ends with me, me alone. Or, with you, you alone. The generous invitation of the human-history-long work of freedom fighting and justice making, is, quite literally, jump in wherever you are, in whatever time period of human experience you find yourself, because there’s always something to be reimagined, remade, or transformed; there’s always something you can do to make a meaningful contribution to the work of transforming the material conditions of human societies to be more just, more fair, more loving so that everyone has what they need to thrive and flourish in their lives. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about manifesting Beloved Community. He was assassinated, for daring to call the nation to a higher conscience, but the interrelated movements for racial justice and economic justice obviously did not end with his death.
But here’s the thing, and here’s the temptation, and here’s the error in my thinking that Dr. Cari gently pointed out to me: movements for justice and collective liberation are never just linear, in the way that a superficial view of history might lead one to believe (“Didn’t we already fight this fight?!”). Movements for justice and collective liberation are always moving in much more complex, non-linear ways. In fact, perhaps a more accurate – or at least, better – way to represent the “progression” of movements for justice and collective liberation is a three-dimensional spiral. What’s interesting about spirals – and a useful analogy for our purposes here – is that they create a trajectory of “non-returning returns”: as you follow the path of a spiral, you will come back around, but you will not come back around to the exact point that you had started from, hence, “non-returning returns”. Another way to understand this is to consider the aphorism:
History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.
Philosophically considering the progression of movements for justice and collective liberation more as a 3-D spiral, always turning even as it always steps forward, we can better hold the hard truth that advances in justice and collective liberation are never one-and-done. There is always more that we need to return to, to take back up, to pick up where others left off, to reassess and reconsider our understanding of human dignity, human rights, and human liberty. And yes, sometimes (many times) in the path of progression of the ever-expanding spiral of the movement for justice and collective liberation, we encounter losses, and setbacks, and regressions, and fights that we have fought already, but now must fight again.
And so, here we are, just a few days from Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which, this year, also happens to coincide with the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the formation of an overtly and aggressively authoritarian administration. But none of this is new: authoritarian and despotic regimes have risen and fallen throughout human history. The good news is that nothing – and I mean nothing – of human invention has yet to outlive the ever-enduring spark in the human spirit – our universal and inalienable dignity – that compels us to keep striving toward justice and collective liberation, toward Beloved Community, in the way that Rev. Dr. King described. Justice is indeed a journey of unending, non-returning returns, and in the company of the good ancestors who kept taking steps, no matter what and in spite of it all, we must do the same. Because, Beloved Community isn’t the destination, it’s what we become, on the journey, if we’re willing to keep at it.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #36:
Huge Cuts to Medicaid to Fund Tax-Cuts for Wealthiest – Is that Reproductive Justice? Jan. 18, 2025
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