Pregnant Women Are Still Crossing the Deadliest Migration Route in the World

“The crossing was hellish,” said Zeinab Nourzehi, a 28-year-old refugee from Afghanistan. She was six months pregnant with her first child when she and her husband Pejvak departed from Izmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, for the Greek island of Lesbos in a dinghy in October 2019.

They had been on the run, she said, since 2017, escaping the Taliban. One of Nourzehi’s distant family members, who wanted to marry her, had joined the movement and threatened to kill her if she refused him, Nourzehi said. When she married Pejvak instead, she fled the country.

They were in a boat with 35 others. “We ran out of petrol and desperately tried to push the boat in the water with our hands,” she said. “We were all facing death.” They called both Turkish and Greek authorities for help, as well as locals to come rescue them. Eventually, their call was answered by the Greek authorities.

While European countries are closing their ports for civil search and rescue vessels, the crises that compel refugees to attempt the dangerous journey to Europe haven't ended. And many, including pregnant women, are still continuing to cross at their own risk of drowning or witnessing the death of fellow passengers, meeting violent pushbacks at sea and land borders, living in unsafe and undignified conditions in the camps, and facing racist violence and discrimination.

Nourzehi took what is commonly considered the “Eastern Mediterranean route,” which is used to describe the irregularized journeys from Turkey to Greece and Cyprus. It’s one of three main migration routes into Europe via the Mediterranean: There is also the “Central” Mediterranean route that travels from the northern coast of Africa to Italy and Malta, and the “Western” route from North Africa — mainly from Morocco — to mainland Spain or the Canary Islands. Although the routes can overlap, change, or shift over time, the Central Mediterranean is currently considered the most frequented, with more than 24,000 crossings in 2020 alone, followed by the Eastern and Western Mediterranean routes, which have counted more than 15,000 and 10,000 crossings, respectively.

All three routes have been deadly for thousands in recent years. Since 2014, more than 20,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean. The International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Missing Migrants Project has tracked the number of migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers, who have gone missing along migration routes worldwide since October 2013. This year alone, the project has recorded 714 deaths in the Mediterranean (as of October 23).

UNITED for Intercultural Action, a European advocacy network against nationalism, racism, fascism, has documented at least 46 drownings of pregnant women in the Mediterranean since 2014, although the exact number is difficult to determine and likely much higher. “We do not always know if a woman was pregnant when she embarked on a boat,” said Geert Ates, UNITED’s director. “When the mother tragically dies, we do not know if we should count the loss of one person or two.”

After the New Pact on Migration and Asylum was proposed to European Union (EU) member states on September 23 of this year, human rights organizations immediately warned that the new policies outlined in the pact, such as those related to “returns” and “border management,” do not provide refugees with humane or dignified solutions. Europe Must Act, an umbrella organization for a coalition of movements in 54 European cities, released a joint statement calling the pact “a slap in the face” for asylum seekers and refugees. “It puts returns and deportations before the rights of refugees, and favors exclusion over protection,” it said.

Europe Must Act recently called for a change of policy that would put an end to the systematic violence along the borders and create an EU-run search-and-rescue operation. In the absence of a more humane EU policy that would honor its commitments to international maritime and human rights law, refugees are still crossing the Mediterranean today, facing death, abandonment, pushbacks, deportations, and detentions.

Bibi Gol, a 40-year-old Afghan refugee now living in Athens, is another survivor of the Eastern Mediterranean route. “I wish I could forget about the crossing,” she told Women Under Siege. “It’s something I don't ever want to think about again.”

Gol, with her husband and four children, attempted to cross the Mediterranean from Canakkale in Turkey to Lesbos four times over the course of four weeks. She was four months pregnant with twins. “The Turkish police did not want us to [get] to Greece,” the family told Women Under Siege. “They harassed us, and on our second attempt, they even started to beat up all the women and children with a fishing rod.”

The family managed to disembark on Lesbos on their fourth attempt, in September 2019, but their last journey unfolded dramatically. "Our boat crashed and hit the rocks during a storm,” said Gol. “It was full of water and floated on the surface for a couple of hours. We only survived because the islanders took pity on us and helped."

Everyone in their dinghy survived — except one of Gol’s unborn twins. Gol later gave birth to a baby boy, Mohammad Reza, who is now seven months old. Due to the stress of the crossing, Mohammad was born two months premature and had to stay in a neonatal intensive care unit for 22 days, Gol said.

Today, the family awaits their next asylum interview with immigration authorities, which is set for 2023. Until then, they live in a small state flat in Athens reserved for asylum seekers but spend their days on Victoria Square in the city center, home to hundreds of homeless refugee families. “We want to be with the rest of our community,” the family said. “No one [else] cares for us or helps us.”

Minette, a 34-year-old Cameroonian woman fleeing domestic violence at the hands of her ex-husband, was four months pregnant when she first tried to cross the Mediterranean along the Western route, in 2013. “When we first boarded the dinghy, I felt like death was all around us,” she told Women Under Siege. “If the boat was going to sink, I knew that no one would ever find our bodies.”

Due to the bad weather, the smugglers she was crossing with decided to return to Morocco. As her pregnancy developed, Minette tried to cross five more times but was arrested by Moroccan police every time. She could not reach Spain in time, and gave birth to a daughter in Morocco, while she was homeless and without money.

One of Minette’s friends, another pregnant migrant woman bound for Europe, had miscarried while attempting to make the crossing. “She gave me all the things she had bought for her unborn baby so I could use them for my daughter,” Minette told us.

“Pregnant women who cross are often crammed onto unseaworthy dinghies,” said Sophie Weidenhiller, a spokeswoman for the NGO Sea-Eye and a former volunteer on the rescue vessel Alan Kurdi, named after the Syrian toddler who drowned in 2015. “They are dehydrated, malnourished, and physically and mentally exhausted.”

The Alan Kurdi rescued 133 refugees on its last mission on September 19, 2020, before it was detained in Olbia, Italy, on October 9. Among the rescued were 10 women and 62 children, the youngest of whom was a five-month-old baby. At least one of the women was pregnant.

Sea-Eye, much like other rescue NGOs patrolling the waters, has encountered numerous difficulties related to its search-and-rescue activity: among them, port state controls and forced detentions, threats by the so-called Libyan coastguard, and conflicts disembarking on EU territory that Sea-Eye believes to be political.

According to the NGO, search-and-rescue vessels face more difficulties than other ships in the Mediterranean; border states often fail to assign them safe ports and, sometimes, ignore their requests for days or fail to communicate properly.

"For years, the EU has been implementing border policies aimed at deterring refugees and bulkheading its external borders in and outside of Europe,” Weidenhiller said. “The focus of these measures is clearly not a humanitarian one, but one of border defense at any cost.”

According to Sea-Eye, these deadly policies are not coincidental. “It is not only a matter of negligence but, rather, of a calculated outcome: to leave the most vulnerable people — female and minor refugees, as well as pregnant women — to suffer and die, either in the war zones or while they are trying to escape misery," Weidenhiller said. “It's also the EU's greatest and deliberate failure to protect human rights.”

Today, Minette lives in Europe. She tried to cross the sea several times in the three years after her daughter was born, between 2013 and 2017. On her last attempt in 2017, Minette’s dinghy capsized near the Moroccan coast; after that, she decided to send her daughter back to Cameroon to live with relatives. She was able to save enough money to purchase a plane ticket to Madrid, requesting asylum at the airport upon arrival. She subsequently spent 17 days in a detention cell. Eventually, Minette was granted permission to remain on EU territory. Today, she sends all the money she earns to her daughter in Cameroon.

“The traumas of pregnant women that we need to bring to the surface are reflective of wider injustices they suffer and need to be addressed as a global effort,” Dr. Ayesha Ahmad, a senior lecturer in global health at St. George’s University of London, who specializes in gender-based violence of women in conflict and migration, told Women Under Siege. “And the legacies of transgenerational trauma need treating therapeutically.”

“These babies are going through hell even before they enter this world,” added Weidenhiller, explaining that the majority of women are raped at some point during their dangerous journeys. The transgenerational trauma experienced by these mothers, she says, “will result in dire consequences for generations to come.”

Until the EU reforms its policies to ensure the protection of refugees at its sea and land borders, the lives of the most vulnerable refugees, like children or pregnant women, will remain at risk. Survivors face long-term consequences due to the ongoing and repeated physical and psychological trauma, violence, and exclusion. Their children may also suffer from chronic health issues resulting from stress and neglect.

Today, Zeinab, Pejvak, and their six-month-old daughter Selena live in Oropos, Greece, in an accommodation facility for refugee families, where they wait for their asylum application to be processed. To stave off the mania of indefinite waiting, she paints the stories of people she has met to occupy her time: stories of pregnant women, children in refugee camps, and displaced people’s harrowing journeys arriving to Europe. Painting, she says, helps to soothe her trauma and sorrow.

“When I was crossing, I didn’t care if I would lose my life,” said Nourzehi. “I just didn’t want to inflict more pain onto my family. Today, all I want is to build a decent, dignified life for my little girl.”