Resistance is Fertile: No Reproductive Justice Without Freedom for Palestine
On 27 October, Raneem Hejazi was eight months pregnant when her aunt’s apartment was hit by an Israeli military airstrike. Unlike her aunt and six other family members, Raneem survived the strike, but her arm was crushed, and her legs were broken and badly burned. An ambulance managed to rush her to the overcrowded Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the South of Gaza, which is being deprived of electricity, water and antibiotics. Dr. Mohammad Qandeel decided that an emergency caesarean section was needed. With cell phones illuminating the operating table, the medical team managed to save the life of Raneem and baby Maryam - for now, because with a critical lack of food due to deliberate prevention of food aid by Israel, shelter and clean drinking water, it is unclear how Raneem and her family are supposed to survive, let alone live and thrive.
In the current military onslaught in Gaza perpetrated by the Israeli State, which lives count and who is considered a human? Just as it has done historically, contemporary STS must engage with this injustice and the wider socio-technical context that is structured by necropolitics. As Wynter, Weheliye and others have illustrated, the politics of life is delineated by the practices of making and unmaking the ‘human’. In a recent Special Issue of Catalyst, on Colonial Lineages of Reproduction, John Gillespie asks whether the category of ‘woman’ is even possible for Black women. We adopt a rather more hopeful frame of ‘reproductive justice’ as developed by Black feminists to think about the potential to resist oppressive structures that tend to eradicate life in the name of ‘nations’, ‘states’ an imperialism. The reproductive justice framework (Ross and Solinger), as established by Black feminists and women of colour since the mid-nineties, advocates for the right to have children, not have children, and raise children in safe and healthy environments.
Sadly, Raneem’s dystopian birthing story, above, is not unique. Israel’s genocidal attacks (so named by the ICJ and international scholars of genocide) on Gaza is specifically targeting health care and life-supporting facilities (and see Lucy Suchman’s piece on the contradictions of AI in targeted indiscriminate bombing) and by extension reproductive rights, health, and justice. According to United Nations Women, 37 mothers are killed every day, while (at the time of writing in November 2023) the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), there are approximately 50,000 pregnant people in Gaza, of whom 5,500 are expected to give birth in the coming month. All of them are at grave risk amid unseen and atrocious levels of violence while medical care, food, and water are still largely blocked from entering the Gaza Strip. Lack of micronutrients produces a serious risk to pregnant and lactating people, especially to half of Gaza’s pregnant population that suffers from anemia. Often, mothers have no safe place to go, lacking access to clean water and food, which affects their ability to breastfeed and care for themselves and their newborns. With residential areas and medical facilities as central targets, women are forced to deliver their babies in cars, in the streets, and in overcrowded shelters where the risk of infection and the spread of disease is high.
According to the updates from the 1st of March 2024, there have been 30,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza so far since October 7, approximately 11,500 of them were children. Also 33 of the 1.200 Israelis who were reportedly killed on October 7 were children, and 40 children were taken hostage by Hamas. All life is sacred, and humanity is not a numbers game. There are heartbreaking stories of unfinished love, life and dreams behind each of these losses. But one death does not justify another. And at the time of writing this the Israeli Defense Forces continue to kill and there is a planned attack on Rafah the ‘safe haven’ on the eve of Ramadan.
Israel’s assault on Palestinian life and reproduction, did not start on October 7, but fits a decades old pattern of reproductive injustice. Since the early 2000s, Israel has intensified its regime of closures, forcing many Palestinian women to give birth at military checkpoints, as they are not allowed to pass to go to the hospital in time. The maternal mortality rate in Palestine, 28.5 per 100.000 live births, is eight times higher than in Israel, where it stands at 3.4.
Israel is known internationally as having adopted remarkably pronatalist policies since (and even before) its creation in 1948, aimed at encouraging high birth rates by offering financial incentives for reproducing large families, welfare benefits for (working) mothers, high child allowances and generous subsidies for assisted reproductive technologies including in vitro fertilisation, egg donation and surrogacy. However, critical scholars (Yuval Davis, 1989; Kanaaneh, 2002, Weiss , 2002; Nahman, 2013, Hasso, 2022, Vertommen, 2016) have been arguing for decades that Israel’s pronatalism is selective, and mostly designed to benefit its European-descended Jewish Israeli citizens and not Palestinians who are framed as a demographic threat. Antinatalist actions were documented against Ethiopian Jewish Women in Israel who were disproportionately prescribed with the controversial contraceptive Depo Provera without their proper consent, and against Mizrahi, Yemenite and Balkan Jewish families upon settlement in Israel in the early 1950s, of whom thousands of babies and toddlers were reportedly kidnapped and housed in transit and absorption camps. Palestinian citizens inside Israel are often restrained by colonial realities from exercising their reproductive rights equally, although legally speaking they are entitled to the same fertility treatments as Jewish Israelis. There is a racialized logic embedded in the selective pronatalism of the state.
The intentional attack on present and future Palestinian life and reproduction has been termed a genocide in the making by scholarly experts and UN officials, and a reprocide by Palestinian feminists. This unfolding genocide is only the latest and most obvious iteration of Israel’s stratified pronatalist regime, which, according to critical scholarship (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Abdo, 2011; Nahman, 2013; Vertommen, 2015.), is sedimented in a century old Zionist settler colonial logic of demographic replacement, aimed at creating and maintaining a Jewish demographic majority in a Jewish state at the expense of Palestinian life.
There is a political and moral urgency to understand the Palestinian Question through the lens of reproductive justice. Reproductive justice means allowing all Palestinians, from the river to the sea, to build and rebuild the infrastructures of life and social reproduction they need to live a life worth living, free from bombs and colonial dispossession. There can be no reproductive justice when it does not count for everyone, Jewish and Palestinian people alike. There can be no reproductive justice without a free Palestine. We must speak out against all forms of racism, including islamophobia and antisemitism. Considering that many of us work in countries whose governments are explicitly complicit in the ongoing colonial occupation and genocide of Palestinians by offering moral, political and material support, the time to show unwavering solidarity with Palestinians in matters of life and reproduction, is now. Our resistance is fertile. Let us commit ourselves to continued protest.
A longer version of this piece was written as a statement that gathered over 400 signatures, and was published here.
