Kenneth Glad
When artillery pounds a city, the initial count focuses on shattered concrete and lost lives. But the deepest wounds of modern warfare often remain hidden. Sometimes the heaviest damage unfolds in quiet clinic rooms, long before a child takes its first breath.
Maternity wards across Ukraine have become an unseen front line since Russia invaded. Inside delivery rooms, medical staff face a sharp surge in dangerous pregnancy complications that put both mothers and infants in peril.
A national study published in The Lancet examined more than 517,000 births in Ukraine between 2022 and 2024. The results are alarming. Extreme premature births jumped 21 percent after the war began, while cases of preeclampsia, a serious blood pressure disorder, surged by 33 percent.
Location makes a massive difference. In areas with heavy combat, doctors saw 8.2 extreme preterm births per 1,000 deliveries, compared to 3.1 in peaceful districts. The danger peaked when mothers faced combat early in pregnancy.
Clinics under attack
Wrecked healthcare infrastructure makes the ordeal worse. Russian forces have launched more than 1,700 attacks against healthcare facilities, repeatedly destroying delivery suites and specialized maternity clinics. Without clinics, basic prenatal care collapses.
A separate study in Scientific Reports tracked more than 700 pregnancies in Kyiv. Average newborn weight dropped by 150 grams after the invasion, doubling the share of babies born dangerously small.
Obstetrician Nanna Maaløe told science site Videnskab that intense mental distress drives the crisis. Constant fear floods the mother’s body with stress hormones like cortisol. That surge can choke fetal growth or trigger premature labor.
A lasting toll
The damage does not vanish when the bombs stop. Maaløe noted that women who suffer preeclampsia face higher risks of cardiovascular disease and midlife strokes. For the children, early biological trauma can lead to lifelong diabetes and psychiatric disorders.
Scientists call this biological imprint fetal programming. Severe stress alters gene development so profoundly that the injury can pass to the next generation. In Somaliland, for instance, 20 percent of young women now battle high blood pressure after their parents survived war and famine in the 1980s, according to Videnskab..
Those hardships wired unborn children for permanent crisis. Maaløe warns that while headlines focus on visible devastation, these unseen scars will burden Ukrainian society across generations of rebuilding.
