A group of thirty mothers had taken refuge in a maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, when the massacre started. Some had just delivered their newborns, while others were in the midst of labor.
On duty during that fateful night, a 28-year-old lab technician, a technician named Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, managed to survive the ordeal. “The sounds of screaming reached me of women and children,” he explains. “They were killing everyone inside the hospital. We who were able to escape, did so.”
This horrifying event stands as one of the most shocking examples in the protracted internal conflict tearing the African nation apart. Armed soldiers forced their way into the building, allegedly slaughtering more than 460 patients and their companions.
Rights organizations have described it as “a crime beyond words,” and a stark illustration of the collapse in safety for civilians trapped in war-torn areas in several nations at war.
An Unprecedented Assault On Childbirth Services
Despite every significant nation have agreed to the Geneva conventions, which commit them to defending civilians, the past year has experienced a historic high of attacks on healthcare systems. Expectant mothers are exceptionally vulnerable due to their dependence on locally available medical care.
Data analysis and investigations reveal an unprecedented scale of attacks: nearly 300 incidents targeting or hindering places and people associated with childbirth over the last three years, including at least 119 bombardments of hospitals and delivery wards.
“This is not standard wartime hazards. They constitute a systematic assault on childbirth.”
The majority of these assaults have occurred in regions embroiled in intense conflict, where hundreds of thousands of women bearing children are confined.
Women have been killed, prevented from accessing care, or forced to give birth in perilous and unsafe environments. The data also indicates that at least 68 childbirth professionals and specialists have been murdered, 15 kidnapped, and 101 arrested—sometimes during medical procedures.
A Worldwide Emergency for Mothers and Newborns
Statistics are thought to be a substantial underreporting, as they capture solely incidents reported in news outlets. In many war-torn areas, information is scarce.
Last year, findings indicated that half of all women who perished while pregnant or giving birth lived amidst hostilities. This underscores a catastrophic reality.
Apart from fatalities, these attacks are wrecking maternal and neonatal care facilities, posing a long-term threat to societal repopulation and recovery.
Conditions within Gaza
In Gaza, the devastating effect on the right to maternal care has been cited by a UN commission as one reason behind declaring certain actions a genocide.
Even after ceasefires, doctors report that women and children continue to die from inadequate care, owing to severe deficits of medicine and equipment. Accounts describe women delivering babies amidst ruins because hospitals could not be reached.
“Direct shelling targeting the wards, operating rooms, and maternity wards,” explains the head of a major hospital’s gynecology department. A military spokesperson has contested deliberately targeting maternity care or seeking to affect birthrates.
Ukraine's Ordeal
Since early 2022, at least 80 hospitals for mothers and babies have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine. Journalism from conflict zones describe births taking place in basements and extreme psychological pressure leading to maternal health issues.
“We are being singled out,” asserts the head of obstetrics at a repeatedly damaged hospital in Kherson. The government has disputed deliberately targeting civilians.
“The truth of the matter is, every facility faces the threat of assault,” notes a medical director in Sumy. “When defensive systems shoot down an aircraft, the falling debris can strike a hospital.”
A Culture of Impunity
For the over half a billion females living near active conflicts, there are minimal protections and a stark lack of legal accountability for those assaulting reproductive health.
This absence of consequences has created a “culture of impunity,” explains a human rights lawyer. “Violence targeting childbirth, like coerced birth or involuntary sterilization, can be understood as acts of genocide by preventing births.”
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 scarce because of a communication blackout from rebel-held areas. Nevertheless, shelling in Goma hit a neonatal ward, killing mothers, babies, and nurses.
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
The majority of childbirth fatalities are averted with basic healthcare, but war shatters health systems. Rights groups note that terror is compelling women away from facilities once considered safe, resulting in risky home births devoid of emergency care.
“When childbirth centers become intentional targets points toward a broader and more sinister pattern: the use of attacks on medical facilities as a tool for terror and to break societal cohesion,” says a legal researcher.
“There is no absolute protection for hospitals in war. Under the Geneva conventions, medical facilities may forfeit their immunity if used for acts deemed ‘harmful to the enemy’, which has increasingly been used as a justification.”
