A group of thirty mothers were huddled for safety in a maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, as the slaughter began. Among them were new mothers, while others were actively in labor.
On duty during that fateful night, a 28-year-old lab technician, a technician named Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, lived to tell the tale. “I heard the screams 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 protracted internal conflict tearing the North African nation apart. Combatants stormed the facility, allegedly slaughtering more than 460 individuals receiving care and their families.
Rights organizations have labeled it “an act of unspeakable brutality,” and a prime example of the collapse in safety for civilians living amidst warfare in several nations at war.
A Record of Violence On Childbirth Services
Despite every significant nation have agreed to the Geneva conventions, which require them to safeguard civilians, the past year has experienced a historic high of assaults against medical infrastructure. Expectant mothers are exceptionally vulnerable due to their dependence on locally available medical care.
An investigation of records show 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 direct strikes on hospitals and delivery wards.
“These are not inevitable outcomes of conflict. They constitute a pattern of reproductive violence.”
The majority of these incidents have happened in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of women bearing children are confined.
Deaths have occurred, blocked from reaching help, or forced to give birth in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. 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.
A Worldwide Emergency for Mothers and Newborns
Statistics are thought to be a grave undercount, as they capture solely incidents covered by the media. In many conflict zones, information is scarce.
Last year, findings indicated that one in two mothers who died during pregnancy or childbirth lived amidst hostilities. This underscores a horrifying trend.
Beyond killing women and staff, these attacks are destroying maternal and neonatal care facilities, creating a grave danger to demographic stability.
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 succumb from a lack of proper treatment, owing to critical shortages of medicine and equipment. UN officials have relayed women giving birth in rubble because hospitals were out of reach.
“We’ve had rockets hitting the wards, operating rooms, and maternity wards,” states the head of a major hospital’s gynecology department. A military spokesperson has denied deliberately targeting maternity care or seeking to affect birthrates.
The Crisis in Ukraine
Since early 2022, at least 80 childbirth centers have been struck and ruined in Ukraine. Accounts from embattled medical centers describe births occurring in shelters and extreme psychological pressure leading to birth complications.
“The attacks on us are intentional,” claims the head of obstetrics at a repeatedly damaged hospital in Kherson. Officials from Russia have rejected deliberately targeting civilians.
“In fact, every facility can be under attack now,” states a medical director in Sumy. “If a drone is destroyed, the falling debris may hit a hospital.”
Accountability Evaporates
For the over half a billion females living within range of fighting, there are minimal protections and rare trials for atrocities for those attacking childbirth services.
This absence of consequences has created a “culture of impunity,” argues a human rights lawyer. “Attacks on reproductive healthcare, like coerced birth or involuntary sterilization, can be understood as acts of genocide by preventing births.”
Other Conflict Zones
In El Fasher, the area was isolated from humanitarian aid long before the hospital attack, with malnutrition spiking dangerously, 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 struck a baby care unit, 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
Most maternal deaths are avoidable with standard medicine, but war collapses medical infrastructure. Rights groups note that anxiety is forcing women away from facilities once considered safe, pushing them toward risky home births devoid of emergency care.
“When childbirth centers become intentional targets points toward a wider and more disturbing trend: the use of violence against hospitals 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 can lose their protected status if used for acts deemed ‘militarily advantageous’, which has increasingly been used as a justification.”
