Between 2000 and 2005, 67 Palestinian women were put in the disastrous situation of giving forced birth within an Israeli military checkpoint. The women were denied access to a doctor and as a result, over half of the births resulted in the death of the child.
In most cases, for a pregnant Palestinian woman to reach a hospital, an Israeli checkpoint must be crossed. This raises the likelihood of a Palestinian women being stuck within an unsanitary and certainly not up-to-hospital-code checkpoint while her child is being born. The process is stressful, oppressive, and dangerous to both the mother and child.
There have been attempts by the UN to train midwives to reach these women during their pregnancy, but this doesn’t address the underlying issue that all Palestinians have difficulty reaching hospitals due to military checkpoints.
