USAID leadership canceled Alex Smith’s presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians.
speaks with Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development who resigned in protest over the Biden’s administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Smith worked as a senior adviser on gender, maternal health, child health and nutrition at USAID until last week, when he was set to deliver a presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians. One day before he was scheduled to present, the USAID leadership canceled his presentation.
Back in February, I submitted an abstract to the conference. It’s a global gender equality conference that was going to be held in May. And that abstract was one of 368 that were submitted. One of the themes of the conference was going to be on intersectionality and maternal health. And I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to talk about Gaza, as we know there are severe limitations for women to reach health facilities.
The day before — the Monday before the Wednesday that I was going to present, I was told that I needed to meet with the Middle East bureau colleagues and submit my slides. I did that. The slides went through many layers of editing and comments. I received a language guide. I was told to remove words like “Palestine,” “Palestinians,” “Israel-Gaza border” and several others. And then there was a column of preferred language. I went along with that.
But I really wanted to talk — I wanted to get the point across that if you stop food from going in and then you do start it again, it’s not like flipping a switch where everything is fine. The starving pregnant women and children is going to have long consequences. It’s going to have lifelong consequences for those people, can even have epigenetic consequences for future generations.
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