SPOTLIGHT ON AMSA REPRO at FP4Change2025!
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
& Aliye Runyan, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Strategist
One month ago, several hundred future physicians gathered in Washington, DC. for the 75th AMSA annual convention, Future Physicians for Change 2025. For this Spotlight article, we (Drs. Runyan and Koetje) will offer some reflections on the convention, focusing on the repro-related programming, sponsored and organized by the AMSA Reproductive Health Project. If you were in attendance at the convention and participated in some or all of the repro programming, we hope that this will be a pleasant stroll down memory lane; if you were not able to join us this year, we hope you’ll join us at the next AMSA national convention and experience it for yourself!
First, a quick overview of the repro-related programming at FP4C2025: two break-out sessions, two clinical skills workshops (MVA and IUD Insertion), and a keynote address given by none other than Renee Bracey Sherman, founder of We Testify. Our first panel discussion took up the topic of what it’s like to be an abortion provider in this present moment, and featured Drs. Aliye Runyan, Kristyn Brandi, and Avanthi Jayaweera. The second breakout session featured these same three abortion providers in a discussion about what it means, and what it can look like, for practicing physicians and future physicians to “get into good trouble” for the cause of justice.
The discussions across these two breakout sessions are exactly the sort of discussions we need more of in medicine, precisely because evidence-based medical practices
– starting with abortion care, family planning, and trans-affirming healthcare –
are in the crosshairs of our increasingly authoritarian and fascist state and federal governments.
Unlike most other physicians, abortion providers have been forced to contend with threatened and actual violence for decades, and have borne the brunt of government intrusion into the clinical delivery of evidence-based care, a violation of professional autonomy the likes of which would hardly be tolerated in any other learned profession.
We are a profession of rules-followers (we’ve been trained to be), and our profession is dangerously close – and inching closer – to passive and active compliance with authoritarian laws that actually cause us to violate our professional ethics of care and principled commitments to academic integrity and freedom. Medical schools are largely ignoring or refusing to address the sociopolitical crisis that is past the threshold and has forced its way into the House of Medicine. And those with significant power and/or influence within the profession are largely silent, with few exceptions. Drs. Alice T. Chen and Vivek Murthy (former US Surgeon General), recently penned this compelling call for physician moral leadership, “The Power of Physicians in Dangerous Times” and there is this growing list of academic institutions, associations, and organizations which have signed onto a public statement regarding academic and intellectual freedom put out by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). While there are over 650 academic institutions, associations, and organizations which have signed onto this public statement, a close look reveals that just four medical schools have signed onto the statement. And you will not find the national associations representing this country’s allopathic and osteopathic medical schools – AAMC and AACOM, respectively – on this list, even though you will see that the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) has added their name to this list. This leaves current medical students with little to no evidence of a profession capable of organizing itself in order to resist and refuse compliance and complicity with the inhuman violence of fascist State power. Institutional and academic medicine is thus far failing to meet this moment with the moral clarity that is essential. In the absence of clear, direct, and responsive moral leadership from the current power-holders in academic and institutional medicine, the AMSA Repro Project seeks to platform physicians, advocates, and activists who actually model a principled stand for bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom, and collective liberation.
Which brings us to Renee Bracey Sherman and her keynote address, titled, “Liberating Abortion: Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve,” based on her recently published, co-authored book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. I highly recommend you get yourself a copy and read it! As we mentioned above, Renee is the founder and co-executive director of We Testify, which employs the power of people who have had abortions and their abortion stories to transform the way we talk and think about abortion.
On the one hand, her work and the work of We Testify addresses the origins of abortion stigma, anti-abortion policy, and the social context of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, patriarchy, and misogyny within which abortions, those who have them, and those who provide them are demonized. On the other hand, Renee Bracey Sherman unapologetically calls for – demands – nothing less than the liberation of abortion: a full release of abortion from the social, cultural, and political constraints imposed by this society.
Powerfully and compellingly, Renee connected abortion liberation with a key concept that we within medicine need to be engaging with much more than we currently are: abolitionism. At one point in her keynote, which was in the form of a “fireside chat” (moderated brilliantly by Joy Udoh, DO, AMSA Repro Project Fellow), Renee said, “Oh, and yes: fuck the police,” to which the students responded with snaps, claps, and the energized rustling of an audience that wasn’t expecting to hear something like that. There’s no mistaking the face-value of that statement, but there’s something much deeper in the point she was making: abortion criminalization is a tactic of a carceral state. (A carceral state is a system of formal institutions and informal processes that place vulnerable and marginalized populations under surveillance, criminalization, control, and confinement. It relies on incarceration of a large number of citizens, often accompanied by other methods of criminal justice control. The United States is a carceral state.)
Renee argues that abortion liberation demands the abolition of every formal and informal system and process of a carceral state that denies and violates people’s universal and inalienable human rights to bodily autonomy / body sovereignty, not least of which are the right to have children and the right to not have children. Her moral call to us, an audience of future physicians, is to deeply interrogate how the profession of medicine frequently gets deputized by a carceral state to serve as an administrative arm of that carceral state power, and how frequently we within medicine are willing and even eager to serve in that capacity. When doctors play the role of cops, we violate the trust and safety of people seeking medical care: we cause harm in violation of our first stated ethical principle. And in so many instances, physicians play the role of cops over pregnant people and people who seek abortion care.
Abolitionism often gets misrepresented as just a desire to “burn everything down.” It is not that. It is, actually, a call to moral imagination: given the horrors of a carceral state, let’s imagine – and get to work on creating – a new, better, safer society in which everyone has what they need in order to flourish and thrive. A differently constructed world within which all people are liberated from oppressive forces of social control and coercion. Renee’s point: when abortion is liberated, we will find that we have created the material conditions for our own collective liberation.
Stay Tuned – Our next Spotlight will feature abortion care and reproductive health related posters presented at FP4Chang2025!
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*Note: this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #46:
Is This Reproductive Justice? House Passed Bill that Takes Health Care & SNAP Away from Millions to Fund Tax Cuts, May 24, 2025
Read the full issue HERE
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