My duty of care to women cannot be unlinked to the women of Gaza and the occupied West Bank

My duty of care to women cannot be unlinked to the women of Gaza and the occupied West Bank

by Fatimah Mohamied

I hold the privileged position of a healthcare worker in the 6th largest economy of the world, an economy that enjoys such a status directly because of colonial wealth extraction, a legacy that directly denotes historical responsibilities of the British to end the current occupation of Palestine. As a healthcare worker, as a midwife, my duty of care to women cannot be unlinked to the women of Gaza and the occupied West Bank. How can I continue to call myself a midwife if I am not “with” all women? How can any of us adhere to the honor of advocating for women, if we do not advocate for ALL women, if we do not advocate for Gaza’s 50000 fetus carrying women?

Last week Gaza journalists reported on the 130 premature babies in Gaza dependent on ventilators and their incubators which would run out electricity should a ceasefire from Israeli bombardment and a lifting of the siege not occur. I felt hopeful that the international community would feel a compulsion to not let their tiny lives end along with the fuel.

Yesterday Gassan Abu Sitta, a physician in Gaza, tweeted about children having to have limbs amputated without Anaesthesia, a consequence of the continued siege with holding medicine. It rooted me in horror and felt so incomprehensible that a part of me couldn’t register such cruelty.

Today I learnt of pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza forced to undergo C-Sections without anaesthesia, due to the lacking medication and overwhelmed healthcare system. I don’t yet know how I feel, I think my soul is too inundated with sorrow and anger to sort out how I feel about this particular strain of horror.

As I write these words, a third of all hospitals in Gaza are no longer functioning as a result of deliberate bombardment or fuel depletion. And still there is no ceasefire, still our political “leaders” skirt around the issue of protecting the lives of vulnerable people; an issue where no touch of controversy should be ascribed.

We cannot dissociate our duty of care from the British woman in her home, or the Birth Centre, or the Labour ward, to the day 20 post natal woman in Gaza who had her home obliterated to the ground, or the women birthing prematurely from the stress of hearing the chill of air raids in the dark of night, or the babies born from dead women as a last chance at life. I can no longer bring energy to safeguarding the birth of new life in London, knowing it is so callously and unceasingly being taken away in Gaza. Trying to ignore this is an oxymoron to the NMC code which we abide by.

It is so easy to feel only gloom and dismay, and I have certainly had a good deal of that these past three weeks. However, the fact that new life is being born in Gaza is a hope in itself, a hope for new love, for new joy, for parenthood in the face of infanticide and for a continued future.  Despite their trauma, entrapment and degradation, the Palestinian people hold fast to life, their culture and their pride as equal human beings to the rest of the world, if not in terms of global treatment, then at least in terms of self respect and dignity.

Reader, I urge you to overcome any discomfort you feel on speaking about the Palestinian struggle, because in the face of the systematic dehumanization and genocide they are experiencing, our feelings take second stage, our duty is the priority. We must fulfill this duty as healthcare workers with common humanity with the Palestinian people. We must bring about the justice and dignity of all marginalized people, but especially the ones being killed in front of our eyes. The only avenue now is an immediate ceasefire and end of besiegement.