“Safa’s words show how war can strip away protection at every turn,” Francesco Galtieri, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Representative in Yemen, told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday, speaking via video link from Aden.
Hers is “a stark reminder of the impossible choices some families are facing and the devastating consequences, particularly for girls,” he said.
Fighting in parts of Yemen has intensified to levels not seen since 2020, and displacement from the west coast and Taiz has tripled: nearly 300,000 people have been driven from their homes, more than half of them women and children.
More than a third of the displaced families are led by a woman.
In the displacement sites where they land, women and girls face heightened risks of sexual violence, harassment, exploitation, and forced and child marriage; threats that – layered on top of loss and uncertainty – are wearing down their mental and psychosocial health.
Tea, bread, plain rice
In Taiz city, the midwives are among the first to see to toll the war is taking.
Severely malnourished pregnant women, they report, are surviving on one or, at most, two meals a day – “a cup of tea or some bread and plain rice”. Miscarriages are rising, and more women are giving birth at home, unsafely.
Of the more than 13,000 pregnant women in the Taiz area, some 6,400 have been displaced. Among those women, UNFPA expects roughly 1,500 obstetric emergencies, caused by the toll of walking for safety while pregnant, carrying children and whatever could be saved.
“No woman should have to risk her life simply because she’s giving birth to a new life in a war zone,” Mr. Galtieri said.
A hospital on the brink
At the Swedish Motherhood and Childhood Hospital, the main maternal care facility in the city, the rate of survival is shrinking. Deliveries have halved, from ten a day to about five.
Incubators for premature babies are down from 40 to ten for want of fuel. Nighttime admissions have fallen to almost zero, because insecurity and shelling keep women from travelling, while health workers struggle to reach the wards at all.
Unless access restrictions are lifted in the coming days, Mr. Galtieri warned, “the hospital itself could close”.
Across Taiz, only five of 27 designated emergency maternal and newborn hospitals are even partially functioning.
Before this escalation, an estimated three women died in childbirth every day in Yemen, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the Arab region.
UNFPA and its partners are responding wherever access allows. Some 129 community midwives seek out pregnant women in the areas they cover while five mobile teams deliver reproductive health and protection services.
But too often, Mr. Galtieri said, the needs of women and girls are the first to be overlooked and the last to be heard. Societies praise women’s resilience without standing by their side in any tangible way.
“Their voices must not disappear behind the statistics of war.”
