Pride, Juneteenth & 4 Years Without Roe:
None of Us are Free Until We’re All Free
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Senior Director of Education & Programming
In the spirit of this month, we join in the many recognitions, celebrations, and observations of Juneteenth (June 19th), Pride Month, and the 4-year mark of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade. May the spirit of liberation move like the wind, lift us up, and propel us forward in the ongoing and interconnected work of getting free, and may there always be singing and dancing along the way.
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
-Bertolt Brecht
This is one of those years when the many circumstances of the present moment make it hard to simply say, “Happy Pride!” or “Happy Juneteenth!”
With respect to the overall material conditions experienced by gay people, queer people, trans people, Black people, brown people, women and femme people, pregnant people, immigrants, migrants, refugees, and unhoused people – and every intersection of lived experience thereof – things have objectively gotten worse in the United States. Human rights and civil liberty protections have been rolled back; stochastic terrorism targeting minoritized and marginalized people is the political currency of the Trump regime; and the violent, murderous fascism of the billionaire/trillionaire class is fully on display.
In 2026, the United States federal government, along with several state governments including most of the state governments in the southeast US (and elsewhere in the US), are enacting policies which are materially reconstructing a white Christian nationalist apartheid state, stripping African American and Black people of their civil rights, violating their human rights, and attempting to greatly expand the legions of enslaved laborers through our modern plantation system of federal, state, and private prisons. Simultaneously, authoritarian powerholders at the federal and state levels are enacting policies that constitute state genocide against trans people specifically. And, four years after the Dobbs decision – whose anniversary we mark next week (June 24) – reversed the federally recognized constitutional right to abortion care, we find ourselves deeper into a crisis of necessary care delayed or denied and increased morbidity and mortality for women and pregnant people that is exacerbated by the delegalization of abortion care, an essential primary care service, across many states.
“We aren’t meant to survive this.”
-Rev. Dr. Roberto “Che” Espinoza, queer transmasculine public theologian
It’s a hard truth, but it’s true nonetheless: the system of socio-economic and political power that currently dominates not just US society but the entire world brings nothing but precarity and significantly increased risk of harm and death to the vast majority of people alive right now. The “we” in “We aren’t meant to survive this” is a huge swath of humanity whose lives and livelihoods are treated as all but meaningless and worthless by a small number of people who, through the channels of capitalism, colonialism, and neoliberal economic policy have pathologically hoarded wealth, resources, and opportunities in proportions that can never be just, or justified.
So, if the vast majority of we the people aren’t even meant to survive these material conditions, then it must be our duty to our individual and collective selves to fight for our own and for each other’s survival. And not just for survival, but for flourishing — although in the face of immediate threats, survival is the first thing we fight for — let us also remember our ancestors from the women’s suffrage and labor movements’ clarion call for Bread and Roses.
In a month during which we observe Juneteenth:
On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed that slavery had ended. That day marked a delayed but powerful moment of liberation, one that Black communities have commemorated ever since as Juneteenth. It’s a celebration of freedom—but also a reminder of how long justice can be delayed, denied, or distorted in this country and how deeply entrenched systems of oppression can be.
-Diamond King, None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free: A Juneteenth Reflection (2025)
In a month during which we celebrate Pride:
That one summer night, in the midst of the chaos and resistance, a small but powerful group declared that they would no longer be invisible. The riot outside Stonewall became a beacon – an unplanned but necessary act of defiance that ignited a worldwide movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
-Amber, The Historical Origins of Pride: Before It Was a Parade
Dobbs erased both the law and the symbol [of Roe]. Women no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion, and we no longer have the dignity that that right gave us. We are now, in many states, subject to laws that criminalize and surveil us, that assess our needs for medical care based on whether we are suffering enough to deserve it, that in many cases treat blobs of tissue, laughably far from anything human, as having rights and interests that trump our own.
In one of the most intimate and life-defining aspects of our existence, we find ourselves not quite treated as adults, not allowed to make our own choices, not trusted to know our own interests and not valued in our own right. In pregnancy, women are now less citizens than they are subjects.
-Moira Donegan, The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebuke
In a month during which we observe the wins, the losses, the ongoing struggles, and the ongoing labor of getting out from underneath the boot of white supremacist racism, the boot of heterosexist homophobia, transphobia, and femmephobia, and the boot of masculinist misogyny, it ought to be abundantly clear to all of us that none of us can fight these fights alone, and that none of us will truly win our freedoms except through collective efforts driven by a vision for nothing less than collective liberation.
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
-Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s
(this quote is frequently attributed to Lilla Watson, but she has refused numerous times to claim sole credit for the slogan)
*This On Call post was orignally published in the AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #72 – June 20, 2026 — Read the full issue HERE
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