Inside Afghanistan’s MSF ‘baby factory’
KHOST: The mother was admitted at 9.30am, the birth recorded at 9.35am. Women often arrive in extremis at the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) maternity hospital in southeastern Afghanistan, one of the most active in the world, with more than 60 babies born daily.
The early hours of the morning are the most feverish for the hospital – affectionately known by the NGO as “the baby factory” – just a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s tribal areas, in Khost province.
The Taliban are active in the region and roads are often dangerous at night, so when 25-year-old Asmad Fahri felt her contractions begin at night she knew she would have to wait until daybreak to begin the three-hour journey to the hospital.
Finally she is resting, her infant tightly swaddled and asleep between her knees.
On average, new mothers are kept in the ward for six hours, but she has asked to leave after just three, to ensure she reaches home before darkness falls again.
Sometimes the mothers have to travel for days, in pain and bleeding, over unpaved, insecure roads in carts or by whatever mode of transportation they can find.
In an opposite wing, the delivery tables continuously welcome newcomers.
The Khost Maternity Hospital (KMH) opened at the end of 2012 in a medical desert in the conflict-riven country with one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world.
It was an overnight success, with nearly 12,000 deliveries in its first full year in 2013.
By 2017 that figure had nearly doubled, to 23,000.
This year the hospital is on track to deliver 24,000 babies, says Dr Rasha Khoury, a Palestinian gynaecologist who is medical officer at the site.
“Here we are saving lives for free,” smiles Safia Khan, 24, the assistant manager of the midwifery team.
Behind her, a young mother of twins searches her skirts and hands her a folded banknote. It is a traditional gesture of gratitude after delivery, at times required in some hospitals but politely declined here. “It’s forbidden,” insists Khan. The UN and the World Bank put maternal mortality at around 396 deaths per 100,000 live births in Afghanistan.
But the figure is disputed, with experts pointing out it is an improb- able fall from the 1,600 per 100,000 recorded in 2002.
Such a decline would mean Afghanistan would have reached its Millennium Development Goal set by the UN some five years early, a study published in the medical journal the Lancet noted in 2017.
The authors of that study say more credible figures released by the Afghan government in partnership with USAID suggest maternal mortality could still be as high as 1,291 per 100,000 – meaning that giving birth is around five times more deadly for Afghan women than the conflict itself.
If so, it is a staggering figure 17 years after the fall of the Taliban regime, despite billions of dollars in international aid, in a country with one of the youngest, fastest-growing populations in the world.