The Worst Place in the World to Be a Woman

War brings unique miseries for women. Gaza is no exception.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

There may be no worse place in the world to be a living creature than in Gaza right now. And there is almost certainly no worse place in the world to be a pregnant woman.

Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas in October, one in every 200 Palestinians in Gaza has been killed. This is a stunning, stomach-churning number. More than 17,000 people, most of them innocent civilians. Almost 12,000 women and children have simply had their lives snuffed out. The overwhelming majority people in Gaza have been displaced, among them nearly a million women and children. Many have seen their homes destroyed. I have to imagine that almost everyone has lost someone they love.

Human rights organizations have described Gaza as “a graveyard for children.” Roughly forty percent of Palestinian deaths have been of children, and one in five of the dead were little kids — those under the age of 10.

What is happening in Gaza — a ferocious Israeli incursion that is costing far too many civilian lives, made far more deadly by asymmetrical warfare waged by a terrorist group that intentionally shores up civilian casualties — is intolerable. It is a horror show for every single person experiencing it. And it’s also a war in which women are experiencing unique miseries, as is so often the case in conflict and displacement.

One casualty of this war: Hospitals. Many have been destroyed; there are precious few places left where Gazans can get medical help, and those are overrun with the severely injured and the extremely sick and the dying. This means that pregnant women are often not getting basic care when they give birth — many are having Caesarean sections without anesthesia, or giving birth without basic sanitation. Many women aren’t birthing in a hospital at all, instead having babies in crowded encampments or among the rubble of leveled buildings.

There are about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, according to UNFPA, and it’s pretty damn difficult to get prenatal care in a war zone. Some 5,500 of them are expected to give birth every month. Every day in Gaza, approximately 180 women birth a child. Very few of these women are able to give birth safely. They are overwhelmingly deprived of life-saving medicines and supplies. Thousands and thousands are fleeing while heavily pregnant, or having just had a baby. Consider that: Women who are still bleeding, with their insides just stitched back together or with bodies exhausted from doing one of the most onerous tasks nature asks of any human, toting brand-new infants and likely older children as well, fleeing their homes for who knows where — often refugee encampments ripped through with disease, where thousands of people share a small number of toilets, where even basics like soap are in short supply.

Pregnant women in Gaza, like so many people in Gaza, often don’t have enough to eat, and are not getting the nutrients they need to sustain pregnancies. The threat of malnourishment looms; mothers who can’t breastfeed are mixing infant formula with contaminated water. Stress, trauma, malnourishment, disease: This is a recipe for miscarriage, for illness, for women dying, for infants dying.

Prolonged periods of displacement and humanitarian crises also tend to come along with a series of ills that primarily affect women and girls: Sexual violence, domestic violence, early marriage, unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion. This war could end tomorrow and the refugee crisis atop a preexisting refugee crisis it has created will persist, likely for a very long time.

It is impossible to write anything about this grotesque war without being met with a chorus of what-abouts. I could go on here for thousands of words about everything else: The horrors of Oct. 7, including those targeted at women; the horrors that predated Oct. 7; the matrix of factors that have made this conflict so intractable and so deadly. I am working on other pieces about some of these very things.

I think it’s valuable, though, for writers and readers alike to remember that not every piece of writing has to be about everything; that pointing to one horror does not discount or diminish or deny any others; that drawing one’s focus to the urgent and utterly intolerable does not mean one is brushing off all the complexities and or the many barriers to just solutions. That sometimes, it is ok — it is necessary — to look squarely at one enormously ugly thing and say, what is happening here is devastating and it cannot continue.

What is happening to women and children in Gaza is devastating. It is intolerable. It cannot continue.

xx Jill