Wartime Birth Amid the Air Raid Sirens in Ukraine Hospitals

May 11, 2022

(Associated Press) – It’s easy to tell the delivery room from the rest of the main maternity hospital in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv, even from the outside. Its exterior wall is piled high with sandbags. In the dim basement, where heavily pregnant women must bend low to avoid the water pipes, there is a delivery table in case the baby comes amid the air raid sirens. Stress is part of childbirth, but it’s not meant to be like this.  At least 49 attacks have targeted medical facilities in Ukraine since the Feb. 24 Russian invasion, including a maternity hospital bombed in March in Mariupol, where Associated Press images of a wounded pregnant woman being rushed from the rubble on a stretcher were seen around the world, personifying the horror of the attack on civilians. The woman and her baby later died. (Read More)