Reproductive health care collapses amid Yemen's war

International humanitarian law protects the right to health care during conflict—medical personnel and facilities are supposed to receive special protection. But in five years of war in Yemen, more than 100,000 people have been killed and the country’s medical system has been shredded. Now the United Nations Population Fund is warning that reproductive health care for women and girls in Yemen is about to collapse entirely.

UNFPA is the only provider of reproductive health medicines and supplies in the war-torn country, the group said. In 2019, it gave 3.5 million women and girls necessary health and protection services. The organization supported 260 health facilities and 3,800 reproductive health workers. But with the advent of coronavirus and perhaps compassion fatigue, UNFPA said it will be forced to close 90 percent of its life-saving reproductive health services if it does not receive more funding by July.

The agency already has been forced to suspend reproductive health care in 140 out of its 180 health facilities.

“It is estimated that two million women and girls of childbearing age could be at risk due to the loss of reproductive services,” UNFPA wrote. “Some 48,000 women could die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.”

UNFPA told the tragic story of a woman named Mariam, a war widow with four daughters who had been receiving antenatal care at the agency-supported BaniShamakh health center. Mariam went to the center at the end of May, bleeding heavily, but the facility had shut down its maternal health services. Mariam bled to death.

In another preventable death, a woman named Zainab was planning to give birth at a hospital that no longer had a gynecologist because of the funding crisis. Zainab died after complications arose when she attempted to deliver at home.

As of February, only half of Yemen’s total of 3,500 medical facilities were working at full capacity, according to BBC.

A Yemeni humanitarian group called Mwatana documented 120 attacks on the health sector between 2015 and 2018. These attacks disabled health facilities, killed medical professionals, and prevented patients’ access to health care. At least 96 civilians and health workers were killed, and 230 others wounded, New York-based Physicians for Human Rights reported. There attacks were carried out by both the Saudi-Emirati-led coalition (which supports the internationally recognized government of Yemen) and Houthi rebels (who are believed to be financially backed by Iran), although the 35 aerial attacks on hospitals Mwatana documented were from coalition forces.

Both sides of the catastrophic war in Yemen, PHR said, “have repeatedly violated foundational principles of international humanitarian law in their attacks on health care.”