Karam and Adam, twin Palestinian babies born after their mother underwent IFV treatment using sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prison where their father has been held for the last 11 years. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

By Silvia Boarini
GAZA CITY, Jul 31 2015 (IPS)

Thirteen-year-old Hula Khadoura sits on a large sofa in her grandfather’s home in the neighbourhood of Tuffah, Gaza City, her one-year-old twin brothers Karam and Adam on her lap. “I am so happy they arrived,” she beams, holding the babies’ feeding bottles in her hands.

There is an aura of mystery and something of the miraculous around the  twins’ births – their father, Saleh Khadoura, has spent the past 11 years in an Israeli prison and has had no physical contact with Hula’s mother, Bushra, since then.

Hula hears people refer to her brothers as ‘special babies’ but does not fully grasp what the fuss is about. She is completely unaware of the unusual obstacles her father’s sperm had to overcome to reach her mother’s eggs.“After the suffering I am put through with each visit [to her husband in an Israeli prison], with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken” – Bushra Abu Saafi

Freedom ambassadors

Bushra Abu Saafi, is one of around 30 Palestinian women who have conceived babies since 2013 with sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prisons in which their husbands are being held. She was only the second woman in Gaza to do this. Before her, two had tried but only one succeeded.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ NGO Addameer, there are currently some 5,750 Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israel. Of these, roughly 5,550 are adult males.

Women whose husbands are serving decades-long sentences do not want to see their dream of starting a family, or increasing its size, taken away by the very same authorities that took away their husbands.

Until recently, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) was highly sceptical that sperm smuggling could be happening at all. Spokesperson Sivan Weizman told the press that tight security made it very unlikely. Recently, though, they have acknowledged that it may be an issue.

The Palestinian National Authority and Hamas, on the other hand, have never shown any doubt and have financially supported women wishing to try this very unconventional method of conceiving.

In May in Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners even organised a collective birthday party for the little ‘ambassadors of freedom’, as babies born this way are often called.

Families apart

“It was my husband who suggested we try ‘in vitro fertilisation’ (IVF) treatment with his smuggled sperm,” Bushra Abu Saafi told IPS from her father’s apartment, where she lives with her five children.

The majority of Palestinian households have at least one relative in an Israeli prison. For a people under occupation, political prisoners become part of the collective identity, they are adopted by Palestinians as long lost brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers and are celebrated at Prisoners’ Day marches and recurring demonstrations.

In the private sphere, the prisoners continue to be individuals and occupy prominent places in the home. Their handicrafts are displayed with pride, their photos adorn each room and the vacuum they have left is still palpable.

A flowery picture frame with a photo of her smiling husband Saleh in his twenties sits on a side table in Bushra’s living room. He was arrested at the age of 23, accused of being part of the Islamic Jihad. They had been married for five years and only two of their children have had the privilege of spending some time with him as a family.

When Saleh was imprisoned, Bushra was pregnant with Ahmed. “It hasn’t been easy these past 11 years,” she told IPS.  “We miss him terribly, my son Ahmad especially. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘father’. He tells me ‘when I grow up I want to be like grandad’.”

Smuggling new life out of jail

Entering a fourth pregnancy was something Bushra did not take lightly and her father worried about the extra pressure. “When Saleh proposed this to me from prison, I was sceptical,” she confessed. “My family and I worried about what people would say. Imagine, pregnant with a husband in jail!”

She need not have worried. The advice she was given, like other women undergoing IVF in this way, was to tell everyone in her family and village that her husband’s sperm had been brought out and would be used for insemination. Since then, local media stations have helped spread the story and both Palestinian society and local religious authorities have been highly supportive.

“In the end, my father saw that it was my desire to try for another baby and eventually supported my choice,” Bushra said. It took two months and many tests before she could be ready for the operation.

Although the women do not wish to discuss how the sperm is smuggled past Israeli security and out of prison, it is acknowledged that it may be slipped into the clothes of  unaware children.

While wives talk to imprisoned husbands through glass and over a phone, children are the only ones allowed physical contact at the end of a visit. The clinics performing the operation,  both in Gaza and in the West Bank, report that sperm has arrived in a variety of improvised containers, from sweet wrappers to eye drop bottles.

“The preparation, the waiting, it was all very tough,” said Bushra. “But when the news came that I was pregnant, the pressure was off and we finally celebrated.” The double surprise came later, when she was told that twins were expected.

She describes the steps leading to this pregnancy as being about resistance and overcoming challenges. “After the suffering I am put through with each visit, with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken.”

Fertility and non-violent resistance

According to Liv Hansson, a Danish public health specialist who has researched fertility in Palestine, the practice of sperm smuggling only makes associations between fertility and resistance easier to draw.

“In a context such as Palestine, where women are well educated and child mortality is low, a lower fertility rate would be expected according to classic demography,” Hansson told IPS. The fertility rate of 4.1 registered in Palestine between 2011 and 2013, then, must be seen in the light of Israel’s ongoing occupation.

Indeed, fertility has long been considered by Palestinians as part of resistance efforts against Israel’s military occupation. For its part, Israel views high fertility rates in the West Bank and Gaza, and in majority Palestinian areas inside Israel, as a very real threat. Talk of the ‘demographic time-bomb’ – the time when Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis – is very common.

“Former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat famously stated that ‘the wombs of Palestinian women are the greatest weapon of Palestine’,” Hansson told IPS. “Fertility is seen as something of interest not only to the family but to the community, society at large and to politicians too.”

The wait

Bushra and her five children will have to wait three more years to be reunited as a family with Saleh. Since 2012, following the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Shalit, Israel’s Prison Service has been slowly reinstating visiting rights for family and prisoners from Gaza.

Ahmed saw his father two years ago for the first time, Hula six months ago and for the twins, the only meeting so far has been through the photograph on the side table, portraying Saleh as a young man eager to live life.

Edited by Phil Harris    

India’s matinee idol Shah Rukh Khan and his wife Gauri Khan announced recently that they had their third child through surrogacy. Gossip columns said that Gauri Khan, a mother of two teenagers, had tried to conceive for the last couple of years and at last resorted to surrogacy.

The announcement, coming after intense speculation by the media, caught fans by surprise; this is something not openly discussed in Indian society, least of all by a celebrity. But the veil of secrecy surrounding surrogacy was lifted earlier by another Bollywood celebrity, Aamir Khan, who with his director wife Kiran Rao went for a surrogate baby in 2011.

Doctors specialising in IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation) say that celebrity endorsement has suddenly made it fashionable among the swish set.

But to many in small towns and slums, surrogacy has become familiar for the possibility of earning money through carrying a child for another couple. The clients are usually non-resident Indians (NRIs) and white couples from western countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal.

The mothers are often ignorant and illiterate, and prone to exploitation in this ‘unorganised sector’. There is no legal framework to protect them.

The 2012 report ‘Surrogacy Motherhood: Ethical or Commercial’ by the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research (CSR), found that about half of the surrogate mothers surveyed were paid between Rs 300,000 (4,900 dollars) and Rs 400,000 (6,500 dollars). Of those interviewed, 68 in the capital, Delhi, and 78 in the financial capital Mumbai said they were working as domestics earning around Rs 3,000 (50 dollars) a month.

“But often that’s half the story,” CSR director Ranjana Kumari told IPS. “The woman gets a small instalment at conception. If she has an abortion, she doesn’t get anything. In case of unhealthy pregnancies, abortion pills are given by doctors to terminate the pregnancy, and surrogates often think it is a miscarriage. In absence of any regulation, poor women often get exploited.”

“Commissioning parents” – as they are known in the business – pay on average a total of Rs 1.2 million (20,000 dollars) for a surrogate baby (more if twins are born). Much of this money goes to the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) clinic, agents and lawyers. “Most often the woman gets about half of what is promised,” Kumari says.

Another study last year by SAMA – Resource for Women and Health, a Delhi-based NGO – corroborates Kumari’s observation. “The surrogates were not given information regarding the various procedures or tests conducted in the course of the treatment,” said the report conducted in Delhi and Punjab states.

By way of contracts, the report says, surrogates said that “they had `signed papers’… without any negotiation or discussion…the document, in English in all cases, was not read by the surrogate or her husband; nor was it read out to them and they were told only verbally what it states.”

But ART clinics are now mushrooming. According to CSR, the surrogacy business in India is worth more than 500 million dollars a year.

Unemployment or low-paying jobs and the resulting struggle to run households were cited to SAMA as some of the reasons behind ‘renting the womb’. Women felt that “along with their husbands they bore the responsibility of paying off debts, or buying a house,” SAMA found.

“We are not against surrogacy but against the rampant commercialisation of surrogacy which leaves the woman getting the short shrift,” Kumari told IPS.

She added that though doctors warn against it, mothers who already have had two or three children go for more IVFs than recommended, and this affects their health. “Are they just production machines?”

Activists and health professionals have been demanding regularisation of ART clinics to ensure better monitoring. The first draft of an updated bill was drawn up back in 2008, R.S. Sharma, deputy director of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), told IPS.

A new Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill 2010 is under the consideration of the health ministry, he said. The bill has to be approved by various ministries before going to the cabinet.

“The bill will oversee the registration of IVF clinics. Clinics operating as banks (which source surrogates) often lead to vested interests. Now one will have to make a choice between a clinic and a bank,” Sharma told IPS.

Among guidelines to safeguard the mother’s health and stop commercialisation is the requirement that “the surrogate mother has to be between 21-35 years and be a mother already of one. Only two deliveries will be allowed through IVF, and that too at two years’ gap between each.”

ICMR is also preparing a national registry with details of the clinics, Sharma said. He has proposed creation of state boards to better monitor functioning of the clinics.

Kumari told IPS that a new study by her centre in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi is in the offing.

“Next, we will launch advocacy campaigns. We need a proper law to stop exploitation of these women by various sections. Sometimes even the family members are involved, coercing them to conceive for monetary benefit.”