The spotty pink blanket, draped over a stretcher; the bloody tracksuit bottoms; the unnatural angle of her limbs; the small mound of her pregnant stomach beneath a pale purple jumper. There are some images that will stay in my mind for the rest of my life. One is the sight of my own son, tiny, faintly blue, rising up between my legs in a birthing pool to be caught in my arms. I was in a hospital, with midwives and my partner and the protective warmth of the NHS around me. I felt safe, even as I felt at the very edge of my life. But another image is that of a woman being carried across rubble, her hand resting on a patch of blood beneath her stomach, acrid-looking smoke rising behind her in the wake of Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, earlier this month. That photograph will never leave me. Nor should it. It is horrifying and it is real and it is a reminder that while many men lose their lives fighting in military conflicts, many women die in war.
In fact, it is sometimes argued that women – pregnant women, older women, girls – are the victims of war. They lose fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, but they also lose farms, pregnancies, access to doctors, the chance for education, privacy, safety and homes. They have their communities destroyed, their futures snatched away, their whole lives upended by trauma. Then, in the aftermath of the bombs, the bullets and the immeasurable brutality, those women are left to create what life they can out of the broken earth. They are left with babies, with children, with parents, relatives and empty mouths. They are expected to grow food and find beds and whisper comfort into the ears of those around them. They are forgotten or ignored by those with power and depended on by those who have none.
I have nothing new to say about war; I certainly don’t have a neat solution for any of the current conflicts happening in the world. But I do have a belief – one surely held by anyone who isn’t vicious or cruel – that it is wrong to endanger the lives of pregnant women. That the creation of life is more powerful, more important and more precious than the ability to kill. It is a crime to target maternity hospitals – any hospitals – in a military offensive.
The number of pregnant women who die as a result of war is hard to measure, in the chaos and smoke and crumbling concrete that characterises much modern fighting. Dr Andrew Weeks wrote in the British Medical Journal back in 2016: “An estimated 140,000 women die in conflict every year. An unknown proportion of these women are pregnant at the time of death, adding to the estimated 303,000 women already expected to die annually in pregnancy and childbirth.” Pregnant women have been dying in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, as a result of conflict, for all four years that my son has been alive. Millions more have died as a result of the climate emergency, disease and political tyranny all over the world. I was incensed by this, of course, before I became a mother. Today, I am devastated.
We have now learned that the woman photographed lying on that pink spotty blanket, in Ukraine, has died. As did her baby. You do not need to be a woman, or pregnant, or a parent to know that such a thing is wrong. It simply is.
