Midwife who worked in Gaza punished in California for watermelon pin

Bridget Rochios is a certified nurse midwife and a reproductive health nurse practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She worked in Gaza in May 2024 at the Emirati Maternity Hospital in Rafah as a volunteer with the medical solidarity organization Glia.

Rochios worked at the University of California at San Francisco medical center and was targeted for suspension after she returned from Gaza last year.

For 18 months, and especially since Israel closed the Gaza crossings in early March – banning the entry of necessary medications, medical equipment, food and fuel – the level of catastrophic malnutrition for pregnant and postpartum women and their newborns has risen sharply.

This is compounded by the systematic destruction of reproductive, prenatal and maternity care by Israeli forces – which a recent United Nations Commission of Inquiry press release said amounts to “two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention, including deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”

In December 2023, Israeli forces targeted and destroyed the largest fertility clinic in Gaza.

More than 4,000 frozen embryos and 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilized eggs were destroyed in the attack.

Read more here: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/midwife-who-worked-gaza-punished-california-watermelon-pin

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