Premature birth fears haunt Ukraine women

Pregnant mothers face flights of stairs as air raid sirens go off or shelling starts. SOME DADS DIE ON FRONT LINE AS CHILDREN ARE BORN

With a pink jumper covering her round belly, Yana Lyakh was all smiles at a Ukraine hospital, even as she recounted what for most women would be a nightmare situation.

The 26-year-old is eight months pregnant, her husband is fighting on the front line and her home town is being relentlessly bombed and shelled by Russian forces.

In search of a safe place, she moved into a maternity ward weeks ahead of her due date in the town of Pokrovsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. “I’m here because of the stress,” she said from her bed in a hospital room she shares with another expectant mother.

This maternity hospital is the only one in the entire Donbas region with a neonatal unit and incubators for babies born prematurely. Despite air raid alerts and shelling, it has worked constantly since Russia invaded almost two years ago.

Lyakh used to live in Myrnograd, a town closer to the front line. Russia started shelling both towns on 6 January and killed 11 people, including five children, she said.

Spooked by air raid warnings and the risk of bombs falling on her apartment block, heavily pregnant Lyakh “used to run from the fifth floor down to the first”, she said.“That’s why I came here. There was a threat” of giving birth prematurely, she said.

In another bed in the ward, 20-year-old Katya Brendyuchkova – also eight months pregnant – was hooked up to a drip. “I’m having difficulties now. There is a possibility of premature delivery,” she said.

Her husband is not a soldier, but works in a coal mine in Pokrovsk.

Pokrovsk is around 30km from one of the hottest spots on the sprawling front line: the raging battle for Avdiivka, a strategic town that Russian forces have been trying to seize for months.

In the two-storey maternity hospital, some windows were protected by sandbags. Part of the basement has been converted into a bomb shelter and generators provide power when the electricity cuts out.

Gynaecologists and nurses have left and patient numbers are also down after most residents fled eastern Ukraine at the start of the invasion.

Lyubov Datsyk, head of the obstetrics department, said births had halved from about 1 000 a year before the war to 500 in 2022 and 622 last year.

Around 20% of babies delivered in 2023 were premature, up from 10% before the war.

Doctors are in no doubt the Russian invasion is to blame.

“Premature birth is caused by stress, chronic stress,” said Ivan Tsyganok, head of the maternity unit.

That stress is aggravated by the fact that half of the women have husbands at the front.

There have been cases of fathers being killed while their wives were in hospital, staff said. Sometimes they do not tell the mother until after the birth. “When we have children, we want them to have a bright future. But today, they are children of war,” Tsyganok said.

Premature birth is caused by stress, chronic stress