Equipping Ourselves with Knowledge & Awareness of Our Rights
& Our Patients’ Rights
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
Sending love and solidarity to each one of you from the AMSA Reproductive Health Project , as we individually and collectively absorb the daily assaults against decency, dignity, civility, civil and human rights, and against the constitutional, legal, and precedential guardrails of this society’s national (and state) governance.
If you haven’t encountered this particular analysis yet, it’s tremendously important to understand that what we are experiencing here in the US, under the second Trump administration, is an administrative coup, also called a bureaucratic coup. This type of coup may be more subtle – in certain ways – than a military coup, but an administrative coup (counted as one type of what are typically “bloodless” coups), doesn’t have any less potential to completely capture the mechanisms of national governance, and radically transform it. We are not even a full month into the second Trump administration, and already the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – a non-official, unconstitutional, and extrajudicial entity headed by the unelected, unaccountable global oligarch, Elon Musk – has “declared” (proclaimed, dictated) the immediate dissolution of several long-established departments and agencies, particularly the ones that have anything to do with humanitarian aid, education, public health, science, and data. These are, of course, the classic targets of authoritarian and fascist power-grabs.
I know this is so heavy, and it can be hard to not give into the temptation to just look away. And frankly, in an administrative, “bloodless” coup, there may not even appear to be so much to look at – afterall, administrative or bureaucratic coups don’t happen with military tanks, they happen with pens and signatures applied to executive orders and declarations from the top which get implemented through ideological loyalists who have been installed in the place of the non-partisan, professional governmental employees who normally do the work of governance, regardless of the political party currently holding the Presidency, or holding the majority in the congressional chambers.
But here’s the particular danger of a bloodless, administrative coup: it is so easy for average, everyday people to get caught up in the acts of administering the coup on behalf of those doing the power grab (in our case here in the US, it is the oligarchs of the technological industrial complex: Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc., with Trump as their enabler). For us in the House of Medicine, the particular risk is that we mindlessly, heartlessly, and immorally comply with authoritarian demands that put people, our patients, at risk of tremendous harm, such as complying with fascist prohibitions against trans-affirming healthcare; refusing care to a pregnant person in a medical crisis (e.g., miscarriage) because of fascist threats of criminal prosecution of healthcare workers who provide an “illegal” abortion; or taking no action to prevent militarized immigration and border control thugs from entering hospitals and clinical settings in their fascist pursuit of migrants, immigrants, refugees, and anyone else deemed subhuman.
The most important thing we can do as healthcare professionals (current or future) is to equip ourselves with knowledge and awareness of our rights and our patients’ rights, and stand firm on an absolute commitment to protecting, defending, and securing those rights against this administrative coup.
We in medicine have a role to play in all of this, and – let me be clear – our role is to REFUSE compliance with fascism, and to stand collectively against the violence that spirals out from fascist power grabs, even when the fascist power grab appears bloodless. Because fascist power grabs are never bloodless. Never.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews
#38 Shield Laws Protect Providers & Increasing Attacks on Abortion Rx – Feb 15, 2025
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