Herat Maternity Hospital: Mothers Return Home with Their Babies’ Bodies

Image: © Omar Sobhani / Reuters

Safura never had the chance to hear her first child cry.

She entered the maternity ward of Herat Regional Hospital with great hope. It was meant to be the place where her child’s life began, but it became the end of a dream.

Safura, 21, says she had hoped to have a son who would one day stand beside his disabled father. But that hope was buried amid overcrowding, inadequate facilities and the failure of doctors to provide timely care.

She says: “I wish there were doctors. It is called a hospital, but there are no facilities or services. My baby was born but died. I came with so much hope, but I am returning with my child’s body because there are very few doctors and no one provides care.”

In the corridors of Herat’s maternity ward, Safura’s account is not an exception. It is part of the daily reality faced by women who come to the facility to save their own lives and those of their babies.

Azita, another woman who lost her baby, says extreme heat and the absence of basic cooling facilities caused the death of her newborn daughter.

She says: “Although life and death are in God’s hands, the rooms were overcrowded with patients. There was not even a fan, and it was extremely hot. My little girl died because of this.”

Rubika also never had the chance to see her child breathe.

She attributes her baby’s death to a shortage of specialist doctors and midwives.

She says: “There are many patients, but we have no doctors. When universities are closed, doctors cannot be trained in mosques and madrasas. My baby died before birth because there was no doctor.”

A Maternity Ward That Can No Longer Accommodate Life

Image: © Kobra Akbari / AFP

According to information provided by healthcare workers at the facility, between 200 and 250 women visit Herat Regional Hospital each day to give birth or receive obstetric and gynaecological care, while the ward’s official capacity is only 100 beds.

One doctor at the hospital, who asked not to be named because of security concerns, says that two patients are sometimes placed in one bed, while some women are forced to wait for hours on the floor or outside the rooms.

The doctor says: “We have 100 beds, but on some days the number of births reaches 120. There are not enough facilities. When as many as 250 patients visit each day, we are no longer able to cope.”

According to the doctor, nearly 3,000 babies are born at the maternity ward each month. However, the number of newborn deaths is the greatest concern.

The doctor says that, on average, around 20 babies die each day after birth, while nearly 80 others are stillborn. According to the doctor, these figures demonstrate the scale of the crisis at one of western Afghanistan’s largest healthcare facilities.

Newborn Deaths, the Heavy Cost of Excluding Girls from Education

© AFP

This tragedy is unfolding in Herat as the Taliban have, for nearly five years, closed universities to thousands of Afghan women and girls, many of whom were expected to become the country’s future doctors, midwives, nurses and healthcare specialists.

Afghanistan was already facing a severe shortage of female healthcare workers, whose presence is vital in obstetric and maternity care. However, the Taliban’s restrictions on education have also halted the training of a new generation of doctors and midwives.

Today, the consequences of these policies can be seen in the faces of mothers who have lost their children at Herat’s maternity ward and heard in the exhausted voices of doctors struggling to cope with large numbers of patients using minimal resources.

When girls are excluded from classrooms and universities, the crisis does not remain confined to educational institutions. Years later, it emerges in delivery rooms, emergency wards and beside patients’ beds, where no doctors remain to care for them.

Between Cries and Silence

Dozens of babies are born each day at Herat’s maternity ward. For many others, however, life ends before it begins.

For Safura, Azita and Rubika, the statistics have no meaning. They do not count their children as numbers.

Behind every figure is a child who was meant to grow up, walk, speak and have a future, but who never had the chance to live amid inadequate facilities, overcrowding and the gradual collapse of Afghanistan’s education and healthcare systems.