SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
#TrustWomen: AMSA at The White House with VP Harris & Chrissy Teigen
Written by Annelise M. Silva, MD, EdM, AMSA National President
Hey there! For those of you who do not know me yet, my name is Annelise Silva and I am your new AMSA National President. I wish I was introducing myself in a time that wasn’t so fraught with the fight for bodily autonomy, but alas, here we are.
Some quick things about me: I just graduated medical school (!!), I am a cis-gender proud Filipina, and I am an Arizonan transplant to New England. In the coming months, I’m sure you’ll learn more about me (and believe me, I’m so excited to share), but I bring up these first few parts about me because as I reflect on what Chrissy Teigen so recently called the ‘sad-aversary’ of the Dobbs decision, it brings back the horror and the outrage I’ve felt that I know so many of us share. I happened to go to a high school who had a very powerful stance against abortion. So much so that there were clubs around protesting at Planned Parenthood and every anniversary of Roe v. Wade, our school courtyard was lined with white crosses as a memorial. So, before I had words to even understand what bodily autonomy was, I was in an educational system that emphasized that any contrary beliefs to what they believed were inherently evil. That’s a lot for any 15 year-old to process.
Now over a decade later and an educator myself, I not only share my own fears for myself,
but I worry about the young people with uteruses who are growing up in a world
where their whole concept of the rights to their bodies are thrown into doubt
by those they will never meet.
As a newly minted doctor, I also now grapple with how to rise to the profession and the patients I have taken an oath for. I, like many others, find myself needing to reconcile how to find somewhere to practice and train freely with the moral responsibility I feel to be in the spaces that need me most. I don’t have the answer for that just yet, but what I do have is AMSA and the incredible work that we are doing in this space.
I had the amazing opportunity last week to visit the White House to represent AMSA at an event marking 2-years since the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade where Vice President Harris and Chrissy Teigen discussed some of the impact of the Dobbs decision and what the Biden-Harris administration has done to safe-guard access to abortion care and protect reproductive freedom. (Quick side note: It was my first time at The White House, it was amazing! I still can’t handle the fact that 1. I went to the White House as the VP’s guest and 2. I was within 2 rows of John Legend. Not the point, but that was crazy.) As I was sitting in the audience, along with leaders in the reproductive justice space and leading digital social media advocates,
I was struck by just how desperately our patients and our communities are looking for education.
Both Chrissy and other advocates made it a point that if they had known more about what abortions were, the medical science, etc., it would have made a world of difference for them as patients. As the only medical student representative in the audience, I couldn’t help but think about how our educational systems prevent us as students from not only accessing this education for ourselves, but how that lack of access translates directly to our patients. When we limit what we are allowed to learn and what we are exposed to, we limit the opportunity for us to challenge the beliefs we accept as truth. Yet here I was, in a room of those who say— absolutely not.
How remarkable. How freeing. How needed.
So, all of this is to say, the work continues. We are not alone, and though it is hard, oh is it worth it!
#TrustWomen
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #22:
#TrustWomen: AMSA at The White House, June 29, 2024
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