SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
No Justice, No Peace: How the Reproductive Justice Framework
Helps Me Connect with Student-led Freedom & Liberation Movements
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
In the time since it first appeared as the title of a song included in the 1965 release of The Who’s debut studio album, My Generation, the phrase, “the kids are alright” has been used both earnestly and ironically as a statement about how, well, the kids – the youth of whatever moment is being referenced – are actually doing. The Who’s original song is an affirmative ode to the creative and generative capacity of the rebellious spirit of youth and the universal desire of each new generation to step into their power and use their voice. And perhaps owing to its pithiness, the phrase has been reused, repurposed, and remixed many times over (e.g., punk rock band Bad Religion’s take-down of 21st Century neo-fascism in the 2018 single, “The Kids are Alt-Right” and P!nk’s 2022 protest anthem, “Irrelevant”).
As a member of the professional staff of AMSA – a student-led organization that works on culture change both within the House of Medicine and in the broader society – my daily tasks and responsibilities are literally intended to operationalize the dreams, desires, and visions of young people who are in the process of stepping deeper into their individual and collective power and exercising their individual and collective voice. As a staff member of a student-led organization that works on culture change, and as a person who has just recently turned 50, I think a lot about this phrase, which for me is also a question – (Are) the kids are alright(?) – and challenge myself to interrogate what my generational responsibilities to them can be, could be, and should be.
And, from my position and perspective, I have to take it seriously that young people all across campuses in the US and throughout the world are saying right now, NO, we are not alright! We are not alright with perpetual war, genocide, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, misogyny, police-state violence and militarized police, capitalist devastation of both ecology and human cultures, and the unwielding demands of the now-globalized extractive economy, which is literally designed to maximize the number of humans ensnared in the many old and new forms of indentured servitude and enslavement (which, in the US, includes student loans and medical debt, and actual rolling-back of protective labor rights even for children).
I’m writing this, aware that this week’s AMSA Repro eNewsletter is being published on the 54th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre: on May 4, 1970, 28 Ohio National Guard soldiers opened fire – 67 rounds in 13 seconds – on unarmed college students who were protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and protesting the presence of National Guard on the Kent State campus; four students were killed (executed – let’s call it what it was), and nine other students were wounded by these state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded bullets. Now, here in 2024, just over the past week, university administrators at Ohio State University and Indiana University Bloomington have allowed snipers – yes, snipers – to aim their sniper rifles at students participating in the Palestine/Gaza Solidarity Camps. And administrators at many universities across the US have sicced militarized police forces against their own students, under the Orwellian cover of ensuring “order” and “safety.”
As I’ve witnessed university administrators at one institution after another take decidedly anti-democratic – indeed, fascist – actions against their own students and faculty (with an exceedingly small number of exceptions, such as at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary), I am reminded that the true function of the western university is to serve the interests of western colonial/imperial State; the the true nature of the western university is that of yet another tentacle of the western Prison Industrial Complex / Carceral State.
Of course, this is not what western universities and other academic institutions will admit to. Instead they claim to be places and spaces for curiosity; for the intellectual and academic freedom to explore and consider ideas, new and old; for the development of critical thinking, problem-raising, and praxis; and for nurturing and nourishing the next generation of humans. These are wonderful and noble notions, but they are meaningful notions only if they are materially enacted through policy and procedure, and what we are all witnessing is the lie (of these claimed commitments) giving way to the truth (of the actual policies and procedures of most university administrators).
My own work in AMSA’s Reproductive Health Project requires me to constantly apply the principles of the Reproductive Justice framework in my own analysis of the presently constructed reality of this world, and how that reality came to be. The RJ principle that I’m sitting with in this particular moment of student-led movements for peace, justice, and liberation is this one: the universal human right to raise up the next generation of humans in safe, supportive, and sustainable environments. This principle demands answers and accounting for the vast, interconnected material conditions within which, and under which, the next generation of humans come into their being. And it specifically demands answers and accountability from those of us who have come before this new generation, who must be held responsible for our own moral, ethical, and political approaches to the constructed reality of the world that we received, that we then shaped, and that we now pass along to this new generation. We who have come before – as a 50 year old Gen Xer, I certainly include myself – have a lot to answer for: the kids may or may not be alright, but the world we are handing over to them is certainly, decidedly, not all right. The RJ framework helps me orient my own response to this particular moment with one major concern: what are the many ways that I can be with and for the next generation of humans who are declaring with their full chest that they refuse to carry forward with them into the 21st and 22nd Centuries all that which should not have been allowed to be carried forward into the 20th Century?
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #14:
FL 6-week Ban Begins, AZ Civil War Ban Repealed, NV Kick-off, May 4, 2024
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