Events in the Middle East are not usually part of the regular Birth Pangs beat. But two events this week, as pointed out by Alison at creekside, brought the state of being pregnant in Gaza and other occupied territories to our attention.

Back in 2005, the BBC, among many others, covered a UN report on the effects of the Israeli checkpoints on the Palestinian people, particularly the women.

More than 60 Palestinian women have given birth at Israeli checkpoints since 2000 and 36 of their babies have died as a result, says a UN report.

Before Xmas last year the Independent ran an appeal with the title, ‘What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?’

In it, Fadia Jemal tells what happened to her in 2002:

“It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,” she says. She was already nervous about the birth – her first, and twins – so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

Google ‘checkpoint birth’ and you’ll get dozens of such stories. Here’s one from 2004 and another from 2005, both before before aid was cut off by donor countries — and don’t forget that Canada was among the first to do so — to the democratically elected, but ‘terrist’, government. Since then, of course, conditions, in the words of the Indepedent story, ‘fell off a cliff’.

Following the election of Hamas, the world choked off funding for the Palestinian Authority, which suddenly found itself unable to pay its doctors and nurses. After several months medical staff went on strike, refusing to take anything but emergency cases. For more than three months, the maternity wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds lay, perfectly made, waiting for patients who could not come.
In all this time, there were no vitamins handed out, no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital abnormalities. Imagine that the NHS had simply packed up and stopped one day and did not reopen for 12 weeks, and you get a sense of the scale of the medical disaster. . . .They have delivered their babies with no doctors, no sterilised equipment, no back-up if there are complications. They have been boycotted back into the Stone Age. The strike ended this month (December 2006) after the PA raised funds from Muslim countries – but the effects of stopping maternity services are only now becoming clear. Hindia Abu Nabah says: “There is a clear link between the deteriorating health situation and the international boycott.”

But, this week, we hear that the Same Old Canadian Government has decided to restore funding.

Good news, eh?

Well, don’t pop any corks yet. On the same day, the Same Old Canadian Government was one of only two countries to vote against a UN resolution that:

called upon the international community to continue to provide urgently needed assistance and services in an effort to alleviate the dire humanitarian crisis being faced by Palestinian women and their families, and approved a text on the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl child.

What was the other country to vote against this resolution? Surprise, surprise, it was the Excited States of Merrika.

Doesn’t this seem just a tad two-faced? Big news coverage for the restoration of funding. Radio (and TV and newspaper) silence on Canada’s quietly standing with our leaders’ heads up the ass of the Merrikans.

Makes you proud to be Canajan, eh?

By the way, check out the testimonies at B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.