Dozens of women were seeking shelter in a childbirth facility in El Fasher, Sudan, at the onset of the horrific violence. Some had just delivered their newborns, while others were in the midst of labor.
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 states. “They were killing everyone inside the hospital. Those who could run, fled.”
This brutal attack stands as among the worst examples in the ongoing war tearing the North African nation apart. Combatants raided the hospital, allegedly slaughtering more than 460 individuals receiving care and their families.
Rights organizations have labeled it “a crime beyond words,” and a clear case of the vanishing safeguards for civilians trapped in war-torn areas in multiple global hotspots.
A Record of Violence On Childbirth Services
Although world powers have agreed to the international laws of war, which commit them to defending civilians, the past year has experienced a historic high of violence targeting health services. Women undergoing childbirth are exceptionally vulnerable due to their dependence on locally available medical care.
Data analysis and investigations show an unprecedented scale of attacks: nearly 300 violent acts against 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 inevitable outcomes of conflict. They form a systematic assault on childbirth.”
The majority of these attacks have taken place in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, where a vast number of pregnant women are trapped.
Mothers have lost their lives, blocked from reaching help, or compelled to deliver in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. The data also indicates that at least 68 maternal health workers have been murdered, 15 kidnapped, and 101 taken into custody—sometimes in the act of delivering babies.
The Global Crisis in Maternal Health
These figures likely represent a substantial underreporting, as they are limited to incidents reported in news outlets. In many war-torn areas, information is scarce.
Last year, findings indicated that half of all women who lost their lives in maternal circumstances were in a conflict area. This underscores a horrifying trend.
Beyond killing women and staff, these attacks are destroying hospitals and wards, creating a grave danger to societal repopulation and recovery.
Conditions within Gaza
In Gaza, the ruinous consequences on reproductive health rights has been cited by a UN commission as a factor in genocide allegations.
Despite periods of calm, doctors report that women and children are still perishing from a lack of proper treatment, owing to desperate lacks of medicine and equipment. Accounts describe women having children by the roadside because hospitals were inaccessible.
“We’ve had rockets targeting 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 trying to alter birthrates.
Ukraine's Ordeal
Since early 2022, at least 80 hospitals for mothers and babies have been struck and ruined in Ukraine. Reports from frontline hospitals describe births forced underground and extreme psychological pressure leading to problems during delivery.
“Russia is targeting us deliberately,” claims the head of obstetrics at a repeatedly damaged hospital in Kherson. Officials from Russia have rejected deliberately targeting civilians.
“The reality is, 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.”
A Culture of Impunity
For the hundreds of millions of women living within range of fighting, there are scarce guarantees and a stark lack of legal accountability for those targeting maternity care.
This lack of accountability has led to a “culture of impunity,” argues a human rights lawyer. “Attacks on reproductive healthcare, like coerced birth or involuntary sterilization, are potentially acts of genocide by hindering reproduction.”
Other Conflict Zones
In El Fasher, the area had been cut off 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 inability to report from rebel-held areas. Nevertheless, shelling in Goma damaged a maternity hospital, killing mothers, babies, and nurses.
In Myanmar, hospitals have come under fire 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 destroys healthcare networks. Rights groups note that fear is now driving women away from facilities once considered safe, pushing them toward risky home births devoid of emergency care.
“When childbirth centers become intentional targets indicates a wider and more disturbing trend: the use of violence against hospitals as a tool for terror and to tear apart the social fabric,” observes 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 ‘prejudicial to the opposing side’, which has increasingly been used as a justification.”
