On Tuesday, approximately 25 students and faculty members gathered in Pomona College’s Crookshank Hall for a teach-in and Q&A entitled “Palestine as a Reproductive Justice Issue.” The event was led by Heart to Grow Reproductive Justice Coordinator Anahita Farishta PO ’23 and Director of Movement Building Sahar Pirzada.
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies M. Bilal Nasir, who helped coordinate the event, introduced the two speakers as staff members at Heart to Grow, a nonprofit seeking to secure reproductive justice for Muslims.
Farishta and Pirzada described reproductive justice as protecting four pillars: the right to have children, the right to not have children, the right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment and the right to bodily autonomy.
“We really resonated with the framework of reproductive justice versus just reproductive rights or reproductive health because it approaches things from a systems level,” Pirzada said.
The teach-in covered what the speakers described as the media’s skewed coverage of Israel and Palestine coverage. It also covered “pinkwashing”— a state’s appeal to LGBTQ+ rights to appear progressive and to divert negative attention from itself.
“When imperialism and colonization are present, there is reproductive injustice,” Pirzada said. “If we want to uplift the Palestinian feminist collective’s cause, we need to view this as a reproductive genocide.”
Pirzada and Farishta then introduced a report displaying various reproductive injustices committed in Gaza. The report states that over 710 babies have been killed, 35,000 children have lost at least one parent and 902 families have been erased from Gaza’s civil registry as of Aug. 2024, among other statistics.
The speakers then pointed to Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s largest fertility clinic in April 2024. They also highlighted the lack of access to adequate maternal healthcare for 60,000 women in Gaza, citing it as evidence of reproductive genocide.
In saying this, they referenced the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948 by the United Nations and which cites that “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” is an act of genocide.
Pirzada began drawing connections to the recent Southern California wildfires, which left tens of thousands of people displaced.
“The way that the destruction has happened in places like Altadena and the Palisades, it’s like a warzone … the toxins in the air will be harmful for generations to come,” Pirzada said. “It’s just unfathomable that this is the daily life and the lived experience for so many children and families and individuals.”
Pirzada, a mother of two, described her gratitude for being able to evacuate her family to avoid the harmful effects of wildfire smoke.
“We’re getting an ounce – a glimpse – into what navigating that is like [in Gaza],” she said.
The speakers also discussed the punitive responses to student demonstrations across the U.S., highlighting the student protests and arrests at Pomona College in the past two semesters.
“We know how power operates, specifically when it comes to student activism,” Farishta said. “We have seen how [Pomona] has suspended students, cut off access to housing, education, food, health services.”
They concluded the event with a call to action, asking students to exercise community care and continue mobilizing against oppression.
“We know we can’t achieve reproductive justice without a free and liberated Palestine,” Farishta said.
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