At the core of reproductive justice is the need to center the most marginalized through an intersectional framework attentive to local experiences as well as global and historical contexts. Considering that safety from mass murder and genocide is a prerequisite to reproductive justice, the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) denounces the targeting of Palestinian individuals and communities in Gaza in what has become a condition of reproductive genocide.
Reproductive genocide refers to the policies, discourses, and practices that delimit, restrict, target, or diminish the life-giving capacities, choices, access, short-term health, long-term health, and life chances of communities made vulnerable by systemic military violence and occupation, besiegement, settler colonialism, and/or imperial warfare. Reproductive genocide includes mass incarceration; psychological warfare; collective punishment; ethnic cleansing; gendered and sexual violence of women and girls by an occupying state or force; gendered and sexual violence of men and boys by an occupying state or force; and forced conditions of unlivability. It also includes imprisonment and bodily desecration (for the living and dead).
In the context of Gaza, reproductive genocide includes the control and cutting off of vital life-giving sources such as water, fuel, electricity, and food; the denial of life-giving and life-saving medical resources; collective starvation; the murder of elderly men and elderly women; the eradication of entire genealogies; the mass murder of women, the mass murder of children; the mass murder of babies; the murder of pregnant women; the obliteration of medical institutions; the mass execution of vulnerable civilians, such as those seeking shelter; the assault on dignity and life; the separation of families; mass detention, incarceration and torture of men, women, and children; mass destruction of schools, mass destruction of places of worship; mass destruction of homes and residential spaces (or domicide); mass destruction of shelters for vulnerable communities; the mass destruction of cemetaries, the annihilation of environments and life-sustaining agriculture, including harvests; the destruction of vital food infrastructures; mass exposure to life-threatening toxic waste, unsanitary conditions, and/or hazardous environments; the illegal use of chemical weapons on civilians, especially those in captivity, impacting the health of future generations; environmental degradation resulting in infertility; prolonged conditions of collective captivity, including besiegement; collective starvation, prolonged endangerment of women, children and babies; and the devaluation of life through public dehumanization and calls for genocide.
Over 1% of the entire population of the Gaza Strip has been mass murdered in less than three months, including entire genealogies. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have murdered 25,000 Palestinians and wounded another 100,000. 60% of buildings are destroyed; most hospitals are destroyed or overwhelmed with the dead and wounded. Of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, 90% are displaced and living in shelters that are actively being bombarded and 100% are food insecure. 9 out of 10 people in Gaza will not have food today. About 500,000 girls and women are displaced in makeshift shelters that are also experiencing bombardments. Reports detail “horrific” scenes in Gaza’s only standing maternity ward, which the Israeli regime destroyed on December 17, 2023, killing twelve-year-old Donia Abu Mohsen who had been seeking treatment there after a previous air strike had caused her to lose both of her legs and killed her entire family.
We bear witness to the reproductive genocide taking place in Palestine by the Israeli regime. We bear witness to traumatized mothers who have to deliver their babies without anesthesia, with doctors using the flashlights of their phones to conduct the operations due to being cut off from electricity by the occupation forces. As Palestinian women and girls of reproductive age are dealing with aerial strikes on their neighborhoods, schools, and shelters in Gaza, they are forced to take pills to stop their menstrual flow in the sheer absence of basic feminine care. Since October, over 20,0o0 women have given birth under genocidal conditions. We are unable to determine the outcome of these births and the conditions of mother and baby.
We bear witness to the deprivation of prenatal and postnatal care that puts Palestinian mothers and babies especially at risk of death, and forces mothers to give birth under intense bombings on the floors of crowded hospitals with no pain medication. We see women having miscarriages, stillbirths, and early deliveries as a result of stress, trauma, and fear, and babies prematurely dying after birth due to the lack of fuel and electricity necessary to maintain their incubators. As a result of the lack of food and water due to the blockade, birthing women are deprived of the ability to properly clean after delivery and have resorted to mass hysterectomies because they are unable to control their postpartum bleeding. Moreover, starvation has made it impossible for mothers to produce milk or to nurse.
Planned Parenthood’s December 5, 2023 statement fails to mention the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Palestinians, the Israeli regime’s 16+ year siege on Gaza, its military occupation on the besieged Strip since 1967, and ongoing settler colonialism since 1948, all of which have been processes of elimination made possible by and through reproductive genocide. In fact, Zionist settler colonialism is predicated on the racialized logic of elimination, by controlling the reproduction and sexuality of Palestinian women. This reproductive control has extended towards the regulation of non-white Jewish citizens of the Zionist state, including the kidnapping of over 1000 Yemenite, Balkan, and Mizrahi babies and children during the 1950s and 1960s and the coerced injections of Depo-Provera of Ethiopian Jews s as a condition of entry into the settler state in the 1980s-2000s.
In their public statements, Planned Parenthood and others follow an Orientalist framework that envisions racialized groups as violent sexual deviants. These representations are not only false allegations meant to deter the public from the atrocities of reproductive genocide, they help to manufacture it. As feminists, we hold that reproductive justice communities, leaders, and groups should support people, not encourage their genocide.
As feminists informed by global Indigenous, ecofeminist, and anti-racist thought, as well as our experiences as Palestinians and Arabs living on Turtle Island (North America), we know that allegations of sexual violence against racialized communities have been instrumental in propagating colonial violence, chattel slavery, racial subjugation, imperial warfare, and other forms of systemic violence on Indigenous and racialized peoples worldwide. We know too well that deep harm has been done beneath the guise of reproductive health, including the shameful history of organizations like Planned Parenthood, its origins in white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and eugenics, and its ongoing institutional racism. Dehumanizing language serves to continue a 75+ project of Palestinian dispossession. Through the uncritical use of such discourse, reproductive genocide is produced, enabled, and even justified. And thus, history repeats itself in Gaza.
We uplift the words and actions of organizations such as the Abortion Fund of Ohio and ARC Southeast who draw attention to and condemn the atrocities against Palestinian reproductive health. We uplift the words of Planned Parenthood Union members, employees, affiliates, supporters and donors who unconditionally demand a ceasefire as a basic and essential step toward reproductive justice for the Palestinian people. We uplift the words of doulas, nurses, doctors, midwives, mothers, repro-scholars and repro-activists that “Resistance is Fertile” and that there is “no reproductive justice without freedom for Palestine.”
We call on reproductive health organizations and leaders to follow suit and take a stance against reproductive genocide by publicly condemning the ongoing attacks against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and calling for a ceasefire immediately. Raise your voices and demand that the people of Gaza be given livable conditions including access to reproductive health and basic needs. Join people of conscience and demand a ceasefire as a basic first step against ongoing reproductive genocide.
We call on reproductive justice leaders and organizations to sign this Petition attesting that Palestinian Liberation is central to Reproductive Justice.
We invite all people concerned with reproductive health, bodily sovereignty, and freedom to join us in Shutting Down Colonial Feminism.
Stop reproductive genocide now!
Learn more:
Abortion Fund of Ohio’s Solidarity Statement with Palestine
Letter: Reproductive Justice Includes Palestinian Liberation – ARC Southeast
Why Decolonization is Necessary for Reproductive Justice – URGE
“A Textbook Case of Genocide” Raz Segal. Jewish Currents, 13 October 2023
A Feminism That Embraces Humanity by Lila Abu-Lughod. Critical Inquiry, 12 December 2023
Palestine: A Reproductive Justice Issue by US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR)
Reproductive Justice by SisterSong
Justice Is Indivisible: Palestine as a Feminist Issue by Nada Elia
Arab and Arab American Feminisms by Nadine Naber, Rabab Abdulhadi, & Evelyn Alsultany
Why the Occupation is a Reproductive Justice Issue by Leanne Gale & Gabi Kirk
Resistance is Fertile: No reproductive justice without freedom for Palestine
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