The Targeting of Childbirth: How Women and Babies Became Targets in Global Conflicts.
Thirty women were seeking shelter in a childbirth facility in El Fasher, Sudan, as the slaughter began. Among them were new mothers, while others were in the midst of labor.
Working that night, a 28-year-old lab technician, a technician named Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, lived to tell the tale. “There were cries of women and children,” he explains. “They executed everybody inside the hospital. We who were able to escape, did so.”
This horrifying event stands as among the worst examples in the two-year civil war tearing the North African nation apart. Combatants raided the hospital, leaving dead more than 460 individuals receiving care and their families.
Rights organizations have labeled it “an act of unspeakable brutality,” and a clear case of the vanishing safeguards for civilians trapped in war-torn areas in multiple global hotspots.
An Unprecedented Assault On Childbirth Services
While all major powers are signatories to the Geneva conventions, which require them to safeguard civilians, the past year has seen a record number of attacks on healthcare systems. Expectant mothers are highly exposed due to their reliance on locally available medical care.
Data analysis and investigations uncover an alarming level of violence: nearly 300 incidents targeting or hindering maternity care facilities, staff, and pregnant women over the last three years, including at least 119 direct strikes on hospitals and delivery wards.
“This is not standard wartime hazards. They constitute a pattern of reproductive violence.”
The majority of these incidents have happened in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, where a vast number of women bearing children are confined.
Women have been killed, blocked from reaching help, or compelled to deliver in perilous and unsafe environments. The data also indicates that at least 68 midwives, obstetricians, and gynaecologists have been murdered, 15 abducted, and 101 arrested—sometimes in the act of delivering babies.
The Global Crisis in Maternal Health
Statistics are thought to be a substantial underreporting, as they are limited to incidents reported in news outlets. In many war-torn areas, communications are sparse.
Last year, findings indicated that 50% of women who lost their lives in maternal circumstances lived amidst hostilities. This underscores a devastating pattern.
Beyond killing women and staff, these attacks are wrecking critical infrastructure for mothers and babies, jeopardizing the future to demographic stability.
The Situation in Gaza
In Gaza, the ruinous consequences on reproductive health rights has been cited by a UN commission as a factor in declaring certain actions a genocide.
Despite periods of calm, doctors report that women and children continue to die from a lack of proper treatment, owing to critical shortages of medicine and equipment. Agencies have reported women delivering babies amidst ruins because hospitals could not be reached.
“We’ve had rockets hitting the wards, operating rooms, and maternity wards,” says the head of a major hospital’s gynecology department. A military spokesperson has rejected deliberately targeting maternity care or aiming to influence birthrates.
The Crisis in Ukraine
Since early 2022, at least 80 hospitals for mothers and babies have been struck and ruined in Ukraine. Accounts from embattled medical centers describe births taking place in basements and skyrocketing stress leading to birth complications.
“Russia is targeting us deliberately,” asserts the head of obstetrics at a repeatedly damaged hospital in Kherson. Officials from Russia have rejected deliberately targeting civilians.
“The truth of the matter is, every facility faces the threat of assault,” notes a medical director in Sumy. “If a drone is destroyed, the falling debris can strike a hospital.”
A Culture of Impunity
For the over half a billion females living within range of fighting, there are scarce guarantees and even fewer war crimes prosecutions for those attacking childbirth services.
This void of justice has fostered a “environment where anything goes,” explains a human rights lawyer. “Violence targeting childbirth, like forced pregnancy or forced sterilisation, are potentially acts of genocide by destroying a group's future.”
Other Conflict Zones
In El Fasher, the area had been cut off from humanitarian aid long before the hospital attack, with malnutrition rising sharply, especially among children and pregnant women.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, information is restricted due to a inability to report from rebel-held areas. Nevertheless, shelling in Goma hit a neonatal ward, causing fatalities among patients and staff.
In Myanmar, clinics have been attacked and dozens of midwives and patients have been arrested, killed, or injured over the past two years of civil war.
The Collapse of Safe Childbirth
A large proportion of mother deaths are preventable with routine care, but war shatters health systems. Rights groups note that anxiety is forcing women away from facilities once considered safe, pushing them toward risky home births devoid of emergency care.
“The deliberate attack on maternity wards points toward a wider and more disturbing trend: the use of attacks on medical facilities as a weapon to spread fear and to destroy community bonds,” observes a legal researcher.
“Safeguards are not guaranteed for hospitals in war. Under the Geneva conventions, medical facilities can lose their protected status if used for acts deemed ‘harmful to the enemy’, which has now become a standard defence.”
