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american medical association
The American Medical Association Is Failing to Speak Up for Dr. Abu Safiya
If they speak out to save just one Palestinian doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
Apr 10, 2026
Israel tortured a 1-year-old baby. They burned him with cigarettes and drove nails through his feet as a form of torture during his father's interrogation. This isn't some twisted, made-up movie scene; this is real life. And it's the one case we know of right now, but who knows how many other babies, in all their innocence, have been tortured by the Israeli military? It also begs the question: Since they're willing to do this to an infant, what are they doing to older prisoners?
It's always been clear that the Zionist settler colony will go to any length to achieve its goal of being an ethnostate. To achieve this goal, it subjects Palestinians to mass-imprisonment campaigns. No title—child, teenager, mother, father, health professional, aid worker—is spared from the Israeli prison system. Because if Israel can't just outright exterminate all Palestinians at once, the next best option is to round them up and slowly kill them behind bars.
Well, that was the case before March 30, 2026, when the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that calls for the hanging of Palestinian prisoners within 90 days of being convicted of killing Israeli settlers. The bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been wearing noose pins and carrying around a physical noose to publicly show his excitement for potentially becoming Israel's official executioner. When the vote was called out and the bill was passed, Ben-Gvir popped champagne bottles with his cronies, celebrating the essence of killing more Palestinians.
These are illegal settlers under international law, who have been terrorizing Palestinian villagers for years, their attacks becoming increasingly frequent and heinous. Palestinians have had their houses set on fire while inside them at the hands of these settlers, backed by the state. It is important to remember that the Israeli military courts operate outside of constitutional processes and have been widely condemned for their human rights abuses. In these courts, Palestinians have a conviction rate of over 96%, most often for crimes they never even committed.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured.
Israel promotes its interests by incentivizing settlers to brutalize Palestinians and destroy their land. And now, after systematically denying Palestinians' right to defend themselves, they are branding them as cattle to be killed by hanging. Israel is carrying out its genocide in the form of codified law. This is the true face of the settler colonial state of Israel: dehumanization to the lowest level.
Right now, Israel is holding the highest number of Palestinian prisoners ever recorded. One such prisoner is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He was the sole lead of the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. For the "crime" of providing medical aid to Palestinians, he was surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers and forced into imprisonment in December 2024.
Israeli society is getting more and more draconian: no prosecution, no unanimity, nothing. Simply put, if the Israeli military sees fit to kill a Palestinian prisoner, they will do so. Dr. Abu Safiya has been in an Israeli prison for 16 months, and there is speculation that he is being tortured. But again, if they can torture an infant, what's a middle-aged man to them? The new Israeli bill gives the IOF a pathway to execute prisoners like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: torturing them to force a confession, convicting them, and then hanging them. Clearly, he's been deemed a threat to the very existence of Israel because he helped save the lives of Palestinians.
This is the situation of medical professionals outside of the West, heroes who put everything on the line to provide care for their people. In comparison to the most "esteemed" doctors in the US—like those within the American Medical Association, with all their prestige and shiny titles—the healthcare workers subjected to deadly imperialist brutality deserve our recognition, and they urgently need our help.
You might be thinking, "What does the American Medical Association have to do with a detained Palestinian doctor?" Firstly, we need to contend with the fact that it is our US tax dollars that fund these genocidal soldiers, prisons, and policies that got Dr. Abu Safiya arrested in the first place. The American government and its institutions are just as guilty of the oppression of the Palestinian as the Israelis are. We need to stop operating on willful ignorance because it has cost thousands of lives in the region, a tally that is increasing by the second with the recent attacks on Iran and Lebanon.
Secondly, the American Medical Association (AMA) prides itself on its strong relationship with the World Medical Association, which has already called for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya, demonstrating alignment with its policies that "support the rights of physicians worldwide." The advocacy of foreign doctors is integral to the AMA as a whole. Why is a Palestinian doctor being ignored by them, then? Maybe the topic of genocide is too taboo for them. That would be ironic if so, when a genocide is the culmination of healthcare sectors being destroyed, lineages lost, and eugenics shaping a land and people forever. These are topics any medical association should be speaking about, especially one that represents the literal country that enabled this violence. Imagine the leverage the AMA could have in the halls of Congress when advocating for change.
The recent codification of the execution of Palestinian prisoners poses a grave threat to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya's life. Will the AMA finally act now, in the face of such injustice and wickedness? If they speak out to save just one doctor's life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.
The genocide in Gaza has shown me that so much of what I thought about society was false. I once believed I lived in a world where good prevails, but I have come to realize that selective empathy is the rule. The leaders of this world don't hold empathy for anything or anyone that stands in their way of global domination. I frequently think of how many lives have been lost at the hands of US-Israeli imperial violence. The sheer number of casualties in Gaza, despite being predicted to be in the hundreds of thousands, has never been enough reason to stop. I think of how one of the first targets in the US war on Iran was a girl's elementary school, which they targeted with not just one strike, but three in a row.
Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured. At this point, advocating for the release of our prisoners who were wrongfully detained is the least we can do.
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'Good Genes,' Anti-Abortion Laws, Declining Birth Rates, and What They Have in Common
Promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years.
Oct 12, 2025
From American Eagle’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney to the Trump administration’s efforts to limit access to birth control to the US birth rate hitting an all-time low, there has been a lot of noise online this summer, and every time something takes center stage, people come out of the woodwork telling us to not get distracted. To stay focused.
And I get it. I do. It’s a lot.
But we can’t just overlook one headline in favor of another, because in America, promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years—ever since the first time abortion was criminalized in America in the late 1800s.
In the words of Leslie Reagan (author of When Abortion Was a Crime): “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among Protestant women.”
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
Back in 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health rolled back the protections granted by Roe v. Wade, the justices claimed to have reached the majority ruling, in part, because abortion rights weren’t “deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions.” But here’s the thing: America had a long-standing tradition of abortion before it became widely outlawed in the late 1800s. In fact, for much of American history, terminating a pregnancy during the first four months wasn’t even considered abortion. It was simply an attempt to “restore menses.”
Before the end of the 19th century, a regular menstrual flow was considered essential to a woman’s health. Herbalists, midwives, and physicians recommended childbearing people sip herbal emmenagogic teas (teas that stimulate menstrual flow) in the days leading up to and throughout the course of their periods to maintain regularity and to restore menstruation if it arrived late.
It was this tradition that politicians and some doctors of the era (specifically those who were a part of the newly-created American Medical Association) wanted to eliminate.
The AMA was founded in 1847, creating a professional group for college-educated doctors (all men at the time). They were faced with a problem: The medical profession was still establishing itself, and so AMA doctors weren’t well-respected in America, but midwives, one of their primary competitors in the field, were. One of the many reasons for this was that midwives were willing to provide abortion services, something AMA-recognized physicians were unwilling to do because they claimed it violated the Hippocratic Oath.
One particular physician, Horatio Robinson Storer, saw abortion as an opportunity to help accredited physicians gain respect: If they could turn abortion into a moral issue, they could destroy public respect for midwives—allowing AMA physicians to take over the field of gynecological health and establish themselves as both the moral and scientific authority on medicine.
With the AMA at his back, in 1857 Storer started a campaign to change the way America thought about abortion—sending letters to physicians and newspapers, publishing books, and eventually working with legislatures to criminalize the practice.
What else was happening in 1857? The lead up to the American Civil War, which we all know was fueled by white supremacy. Not only was much of America fighting for the right to enslave people, they also feared being outnumbered by the very people they were trying to enslave. And with the declining birth rates among white, Protestant women, it was a well-founded fear (and one that wasn’t only limited to the South, especially with the influx of immigrants in northern cities).
Storer used this fear to his advantage.
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
The argument was a powerful one—one that changed the way America viewed abortion for 100 years. How did they do it? By destroying the concept of quickening, thereby reclassifying the restoration of menses as abortion and criminalizing those who practiced it. They stated quickening was little more than a feeling, and a feeling wasn’t medicine. This in turn discredited childbearing people as the ones who knew their own bodies best.
The AMA’s efforts culminated in the Comstock Law in 1873, which made the public discussion of birth control and abortion illegal by banning it as obscenity, and by 1880, every state had laws restricting abortion. Early-term abortion, which had once been considered an essential part of women’s healthcare, was labeled evil (and criminal) and midwives were rebranded as abortionists. These views of abortion continued for 100 years until Roe v. Wade gave people with uteruses the right to an abortion, and it’s clear they’ve persisted in the decades since.
Now, to be clear, most doctors today recognize abortion as healthcare. This isn’t meant to demonize modern-day physicians. But as we look to today’s headlines when it comes to the health of childbearing people, it’s almost impossible not to draw parallels, and keep this reality in mind as we fight to regain the rights the Supreme Court has stripped us of.
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Medical Groups Tell EPA: Don't Kill 'Main Tool' to Combat Climate Crisis
"It is unconscionable that the agency charged with protecting Americans from environmental threats would consider rescinding policies based on years of evidence-based practice," said the head of one nursing group.
Sep 22, 2025
Over 120 top health and medical organizations on Monday joined the growing chorus of opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency's attempt to roll back the landmark legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people.
"The Trump administration's effort to rescind the EPA's endangerment finding is not only dangerous—it's an attack on science and on the health of the American people. Undoing the endangerment finding would remove the federal government's main tool to combat climate change," explained Katie Huffling, executive director of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments.
The alliance joined the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health (MSCCH) in writing a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Other signatories include national organizations such as the American College of Physicians, American Medical Association, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, along with scores of state groups.
"The science is clear: Climate change is real, driven primarily by human-caused emissions, and harming both our health and the
economy today," the letter states. "The health harms of climate change caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are well understood and acknowledged by the American medical and scientific communities."
Today @docsforclimate.bsky.social released a letter signed by over 120 national/state orgs across medicine, nursing, pharmacy, & veterinary medicine, across 36 states recognizing #climatechange as a profound danger to our health. We’re asking EPA to protect the #endangermentfinding lnkd.in/grgEZ2qF
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— Lisa Patel, MD (@lisapatel.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 11:38 AM
The letter highlights various health impacts tied to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which include an increased range for mosquitoes that spread diseases, worsening mental health, rising cardiovascular deaths, higher risks for respiratory conditions, and conditions that exacerbate chronic diseases. It emphasizes risks for pregnant people, children, and the elderly.
"No matter where they live, children are uniquely vulnerable to hazardous air pollution. Children are not little adults, and their lungs are still developing, putting them at greater risk for harmful impacts to their lifelong health and development," noted American Academy of Pediatrics president Dr. Susan J. Kressly.
"The Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to repeal the endangerment finding would jeopardize the progress we’ve made to protect child health and leave children susceptible to chronic illnesses, like asthma," she warned.
Challenging the Trump administration's argument for rolling back the 2009 finding, MSCCH executive director Dr. Lisa Patel stressed that "the administration's claim that climate change is not a significant threat is contrary to what nurses, doctors, and pharmacists witness every day in our clinical practice."
"Beyond the devastating toll of wildfires, unprecedented extreme heat, and superstorms and floods that decimate entire communities, we are seeing clinics and hospitals themselves damaged or destroyed, and critical supply chains disrupted," Patel pointed out. "That means in times of crisis we cannot provide even the most basic care patients desperately need."
National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners president Felesia Bowen declared that "it is unconscionable that the agency charged with protecting Americans from environmental threats would consider rescinding policies based on years of evidence-based practice."
The signatories are calling on the administration to not only withdraw its proposed rescission of the endangerment finding but also reaffirm the EPA's obligation to regulate GHG pollution under the Clean Air Act and strengthen protections against climate-related health threats through ambitious emissions standards.
"The science is compelling—climate change is a clear and present danger for the health of our patients and communities," said Dr. Alison Lee, Chair of the ATS Environmental Health Policy Committee. "Last week's National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report confirms what the medical community already knows: Climate change is harming our patients and, absent urgent action, the harms will escalate."
"Let us be clear—the medical community is standing together in its opposition to rolling back the EPA GHG endangerment finding," she added.
Also citing the report released last week, David Arkush, who directs the climate program at the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a Monday statement that "the EPA is proposing to move exactly opposite to the way that the law and its mission require—flouting overwhelming scientific evidence and ignoring required procedures to reach a predetermined political outcome on behalf of mass polluters."
"The agency should reverse course and drop this misguided and unlawful action," he argued. "Failing that, the courts should roundly reject it."
His statement and the medical coalition's letter come on the last day of the public comment period for the proposal, and after more than 1,000 scientists, public health experts, and economists sent another letter to Zeldin last week detailing why they "strenuously object" to his effort to repeal the legal opinion that underpins federal climate regulations.
The effort to repeal the endangerment finding is just one prong of Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump's war on climate policies, which also includes ending the collection of pollution data, clawing back $7 billion in federal grants for low- and middle-income households to install rooftop solar panels, declaring a national energy emergency, and ditching the Paris Agreement.
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