Dozens of women were seeking shelter in a maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, as the slaughter began. Several had recently given birth, while others were experiencing childbirth.
Working that night, a 28-year-old lab technician, a technician named Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, managed to survive the ordeal. “I heard the screams of women and children,” he recounts. “They were killing everyone inside the hospital. Survival meant running for your life.”
This brutal attack stands as a particularly egregious examples in the ongoing war tearing the North African nation apart. Combatants stormed the facility, reportedly killing more than 460 individuals receiving care and their families.
Rights organizations have called it “an unspeakable atrocity,” and a clear case of the vanishing safeguards for civilians trapped in war-torn areas in multiple global hotspots.
A Record of Violence Against Maternal Care
Despite every significant nation have signed the international laws of war, which commit them to defending civilians, the past year has experienced a historic high of attacks on healthcare systems. Women undergoing childbirth are highly exposed due to their dependence on locally available medical care.
An investigation of records reveal an alarming level of violence: nearly 300 incidents targeting or hindering places and people associated with childbirth over the last three years, including at least 119 targeted attacks against hospitals and delivery wards.
“This is not standard wartime hazards. They constitute a pattern of reproductive violence.”
The majority of these assaults have occurred in regions embroiled in intense conflict, where countless of expectant mothers are stranded.
Deaths have occurred, blocked from reaching help, or made to have their babies in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. The data also indicates that at least 68 midwives, obstetricians, and gynaecologists have been slain, 15 kidnapped, and 101 detained—sometimes while assisting births.
The Global Crisis for Mothers and Newborns
Statistics are thought to be a substantial underreporting, as they only include incidents reported in news outlets. In many areas of fighting, communications are sparse.
Last year, analysis showed that half of all women who died during pregnancy or childbirth lived amidst hostilities. This underscores a horrifying trend.
Apart from fatalities, these attacks are destroying hospitals and wards, jeopardizing the future to community survival.
Conditions within Gaza
In Gaza, the catastrophic impact on the right to maternal care has been cited by a UN commission as a factor in declaring certain actions a genocide.
Following truces, doctors report that women and children are still perishing from medical shortages, owing to desperate lacks of medicine and equipment. UN officials have relayed women giving birth in rubble because hospitals were out of reach.
“We’ve had rockets targeting 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 seeking to affect birthrates.
The Crisis in Ukraine
Since early 2022, at least 80 hospitals for mothers and babies have been struck and ruined in Ukraine. Reports from frontline hospitals describe births taking place in basements and skyrocketing stress leading to birth complications.
“We are being singled out,” asserts the head of obstetrics at a repeatedly damaged hospital in Kherson. Officials from Russia have rejected deliberately targeting civilians.
“In fact, every facility is now a potential target,” comments a medical director in Sumy. “When defensive systems shoot down an aircraft, the falling debris may hit a hospital.”
A Culture of Impunity
For the more than 676 million women living within range of fighting, there are minimal protections and a stark lack of legal accountability for those attacking childbirth services.
This absence of consequences has created a “atmosphere of lawlessness,” explains a human rights lawyer. “Attacks on reproductive healthcare, like forced pregnancy or forced sterilisation, are potentially acts of genocide by destroying a group's future.”
Additional Hotspots
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 lack of access from rebel-held areas. Nevertheless, shelling in Goma damaged a maternity hospital, causing fatalities among patients and staff.
In Myanmar, medical facilities have been bombed and dozens of midwives and patients have faced detention, death, or harm over the past two years of civil war.
The End of Safe Deliveries
A large proportion of mother deaths are avoidable with standard medicine, but war destroys healthcare networks. Rights groups note that anxiety is forcing women away from facilities once considered safe, resulting in risky home births without skilled assistance.
“When childbirth centers become intentional targets speaks to a wider and more disturbing trend: the use of attacks on medical facilities as a weapon to spread fear and to destroy community bonds,” notes a legal researcher.
“There is no absolute protection for hospitals in war. Under the Geneva conventions, medical facilities are not inviolable if used for acts deemed ‘harmful to the enemy’, which has now become a standard defence.”
