WUNRN
SYRIA - PREGNANT IN WAR - SERIOUS
WOMEN'S MEDICAL CRISIS
– September 19, 2013
Marjie
Middleton, a midwife working with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), spent several
months this year on the Syria-Lebanon border. “I was there because MSF
recognized that women’s health wasn’t being dealt with appropriately or not at
all in the refugee situation,” she said. “They sent me over to assess and open
clinics for women’s health. At the time, they had seven clinics open for
primary health care, but none provided pre- or postnatal care. So we opened
four, dealing specifically with women’s health and pregnancy.” She spoke with
Middleton counsels
Syrian women on maternal health. One 18-year-old refugee, was seven months
pregnant when she crossed to
The trick is to try
and tell you about the scope of the problem. It’s just so huge. I was
completely taken aback by the complete lack of attention to women’s health. The
priority is the war wounded and those who need surgery. But when a woman is
pregnant, that’s also an “immediate” need.
Most of the refugees
are crossing into the
I was tasked with
assessing the overall women’s health situation, so I spoke with hundreds of
women up and down the Bekaa. They were from everywhere:
Women were telling me
how their last pregnancy was stillborn and now they’re pregnant again, and how
scared they are being pregnant again and not having access to prenatal care.
It’s a terrifying feeling. One woman came across after a stillbirth. They told
her it had happened because she had high blood pressure. She was now pregnant
again, and she came over to
When I met her, she
was desperate, nine months pregnant, and she said, “I can’t get help, but I
know there’s a problem with the baby. I don’t know where to go, I can’t afford
the fees.” We tried to this woman help, but lost contact with her. We think she
went back to
Another woman I met in
one of our clinics was pregnant with her second baby. The first one was a
healthy little boy. She was nine months pregnant in
Imagine being nine
months pregnant, having your husband die and then having nowhere to go but
another country where you have no access to health care or any services, unless
you’re very rich.
The U.N. was there,
but they’re but no longer giving fast-track registration to pregnant women.
They stopped in April for financial reasons. They also stopped paying 100
percent of birth costs for refugees. So now these women have to come up with 25
percent of the cost of delivery. Where we were, for a normal delivery, that fee
would be between $50 and $200 for a cesarean. That’s a couple of days’ work for
a daily laborer, and they might get one to two days a week if they’re lucky. So
that’s their wages for a week. And that’s if you have a husband to do the daily
work. If you don’t have a husband, or resources, you have no money to have the
baby.
Middleton supervises
consultations by qualified Lebanese midwives. / Courtesy MSF
There are still some
Lebanese in the Bekaa who are helping out, but the Lebanese host population is
already saturated. We met some Lebanese midwives who were helping Syrians give
birth for free, but they are having to stop because they can’t afford it
anymore. Lack of access to information about services is also an issue. One
woman we met was due to head back to
We were seeing quite a
lot of newborns with problems. What happens is that moms and babies are
discharged from the hospital immediately because they can’t afford more days.
Babies are coming in dehydrated because mothers didn’t know how to breastfeed
properly, or women switch to formula then can’t afford more. In the first two
months of opening women’s health clinics, I thought we’d see 200 patients and
we saw 850. It was quadruple what we expected. People in the
The other women’s
health need that’s high is contraception and family planning. There’s a
perception in
One woman had walked
over the mountains with her children, and her first stop was us because she’d
run out of her pill in