United Nations Radio

For pregnant women in Gaza, the current hostilities are making an already challenging situation even more difficult.

With delivery wards being used as surgical facilities to treat the wounded, for example, more women are forced to deliver at home.

The UN Population Fund supported a hotline in Gaza and the West Bank where trained personnel helped family members through home deliveries, but with no electricity that hotline no longer functions.

As Pamela Delargy of UNFPA tells UN Radio's Gerry Adams, they can now only wonder what is happening to women and their infants.

DELARGY: We know that women are not being able to go out to clinics, or to reach hospitals for delivery. We know that the trauma of the bombings and the shootings and the constant bombardment are causing a tremendous amount of stress and in any situation, this has very, very negative consequences on healthy pregnancies. We know that women with very young children who are breastfeeding are in such conflict situations when it's very stressful actually are not able to produce milk for their babies or children. And this is particularly an issue right now in Gaza because there is very little other food going in.

So one of the things we're all most worried about I think is the lack of information. We are having to deduce things right now from what our staff in Gaza can find out from some of the clinics that are working and what they are seeing is significantly fewer women coming in for deliveries and certainly no women coming in for pre-natal care right now. It is just considered too dangerous to leave your house or to leave the shelter to try to get to a health facility. In Gaza there are also mobile health services that existed before the current crisis where there were nurse mid-wives and others who were going to households to provide support and pre-natal care, vitamins and other kinds of things and of course none of this is happening right now at all.

ADAMS: Can you talk about the use of delivery wards for
surgical treatment of the wounded instead of for the delivery of babies and how this is affecting women?

DELARGY: The major hospitals in Gaza all had pretty good, strong maternity wards. Because of the need to convert as much space as possible in the major referral hospitals for treatment of wounded, actually these wards have been turned into something like trauma centers for surgery, for repair or for fixing of broken bones and that sort of thing. There are two things happening: one, there is not the space for the women to be there in the ward and two, many women are simply not going to the hospital because it is just so dangerous to move around. And people are so worried to move. This is a problem because about 15% of all pregnancies, even in the best of times, when women are well-fed, healthy and not in a stressful environment, have some kind of complication which absolutely requires emergency obstetric care.

We have heard from our staff that in some neighborhoods when a woman is needing to deliver or needing some kind of assistance with the pregnancy, there've been calls going out on the loudspeakers of the mosque to ask if there is anyone in the neighborhood, any nurse or midwife who can come to help. So we can't give the numbers right now, but one thing I can tell you is in a normal day in Gaza, 170 women will deliver babies. That means that every single day that 170 women plus the babies - that's 340 people - are at risk because of the inability to get to even the most basic of health services, the inability to have the type of food or nutrition they need and complete insecurity and lack of safety.

Pamela Delargy, head of the UN Population Fund's Humanitarian Response Branch, speaking to UN Radio from Jerusalem.

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