Thirty women were huddled for safety in a maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, when the massacre started. Among them were new mothers, while others were actively in 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 were killing everyone inside the hospital. Those who could run, fled.”
This brutal attack stands as a particularly egregious examples in the two-year civil war tearing the African nation apart. Combatants forced their way into the building, leaving dead more than 460 patients and their companions.
Rights organizations have called it “a crime beyond words,” and a stark illustration of the vanishing safeguards for civilians living amidst warfare in multiple global hotspots.
An Unprecedented Assault Against Maternal Care
Despite every significant nation have agreed to the international laws of war, which commit them to defending civilians, the past year has experienced a historic high of assaults against medical infrastructure. Women undergoing childbirth are particularly at risk due to their need for locally available medical care.
An investigation of records uncover an alarming level of violence: nearly 300 attacks on and disruptions to maternity care facilities, staff, and pregnant women over the last three years, including at least 119 direct strikes on hospitals and delivery wards.
“These are not natural consequences of war. They form a pattern of reproductive violence.”
The majority of these attacks have taken place in regions embroiled in intense conflict, where countless of women bearing children are confined.
Women have been killed, blocked from reaching help, or forced to give birth in perilous and unsafe environments. The data also indicates that at least 68 childbirth professionals and specialists have been killed, 15 abducted, and 101 detained—sometimes in the act of delivering babies.
The Global Crisis in Maternal Health
The numbers are probably a grave undercount, as they only include incidents covered by the media. In many war-torn areas, communications are sparse.
Last year, it was reported that 50% of women who lost their lives in maternal circumstances resided in a war zone. This underscores a horrifying trend.
Beyond killing women and staff, these attacks are destroying critical infrastructure for mothers and babies, creating a grave danger to community survival.
Conditions within Gaza
In Gaza, the devastating effect on reproductive health rights has been cited by a UN commission as part of the basis for accusations of genocidal acts.
Even after ceasefires, doctors report that women and children continue to die from inadequate care, owing to critical shortages of medicine and equipment. Accounts describe women delivering babies amidst ruins because hospitals were inaccessible.
“We’ve had rockets targeting the wards, operating rooms, and maternity wards,” explains the head of a major hospital’s gynecology department. A military spokesperson has denied deliberately targeting maternity care or trying to alter birthrates.
Ukraine's Ordeal
Since early 2022, at least 80 childbirth centers have been attacked and rendered unusable in Ukraine. Reports from frontline hospitals describe births forced underground and skyrocketing stress leading to problems during delivery.
“The attacks on us are intentional,” claims 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 can be under attack now,” states a medical director in Sumy. “When defensive systems shoot down an aircraft, the falling debris may hit a hospital.”
Accountability Evaporates
For the more than 676 million women living close to deadly warfare, there are few safeguards and rare trials for atrocities for those attacking childbirth services.
This void of justice has led to a “environment where anything goes,” says a human rights lawyer. “Assaults against maternal services, like forced pregnancy or forced sterilisation, are potentially acts of genocide by hindering reproduction.”
Additional Hotspots
In El Fasher, the area lacked access to humanitarian aid long before the hospital attack, with malnutrition increasing drastically, 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, medical facilities have been bombed and dozens of midwives and patients have suffered violence over the past two years of civil war.
The Collapse of Safe Childbirth
A large proportion of mother deaths are averted with basic healthcare, but war destroys healthcare networks. Rights groups note that fear is now driving women away from facilities once considered safe, resulting in risky home births lacking professional help.
“The deliberate attack on maternity wards points toward a broader and more sinister pattern: the use of violence against hospitals as a tool for terror and to break societal cohesion,” notes a legal researcher.
“Safeguards are not guaranteed for hospitals in war. Under the Geneva conventions, medical facilities are not inviolable if used for acts deemed ‘harmful to the enemy’, which has increasingly been used as a justification.”
