“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,” says NellFrizzell.
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.
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 theback 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.
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.
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