As the Russian invasion of Ukraine now enters the second month, doctors are now starting to see a sharp rise in the number of premature births in some areas of the war-torn country.
Prenatal clinics in both the cities of Lviv and Kharkiv have revealed to the BBC that the rate of preemie babies being born there has doubled or tripled in the past few weeks, with the surge in preterm births a direct result of pregnant women dealing with stress and medical issues due to the war.
Polina, born in a regional perinatal clinic in Kharkiv, weighed just 630 grams (1.4 pounds) at birth. That is way below the average weight for a full-term baby girl, which is five times the weight recorded on Polina.
Premature births soar in Kharkiv
The same scenario happened to Viktoria, born in a perinatal hospital in Lviv in early March alongside her twin sister Veronika. They were born in Western Ukraine after their mother decided to flee the fighting in Kyiv. Viktoria, who weighed just 800 grams (1.7 pounds) at birth, has just passed her first kilogram.
Iryna Kondratova, the medical director in charge of baby Polina's care, said that the premature births at her Kharkiv clinic had jumped to three times their normal rate, accounting for 50 percent of all deliveries since the war started.
Kondratova grabbed the headlines recently when superstar David Beckham transferred his Instagram account to her so that she could recount the ravages left by the Russian invasion on his social media platform, according to a report by Yahoo!.
According to Kondratova, infections, lack of medical help, and bad nutrition brought upon by war creates a risk of premature birth. She added that their premature birth rate was already high because they had a lot of patients coming from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Kondratova explained that women in conflict zones spend a lot of their time in crowded basements, where infections are active. She added that it is also harder for women to reach medical help if they need it. Kondratova admitted that while the percentage of premature births in her clinic has soared in the past weeks, the total number of her patients has decreased with many women fleeing the conflict in Kharkiv.
Preemie twins born in Lviv after mother flees Kyiv
However, the same cannot be said in Lviv, with plenty of refugees making the trek to this Ukrainian city to escape the war zone. That was the case for Viktoria's mother, Iryna Zelena, who fled Kyiv just before giving birth to her twins.
Zelena said she left the capital city because of the mass shelling and that they had been in the bomb shelter all the time. Zelena added that the stress of being in a bunker during the first days of the war contributed to her delivering the twins prematurely, more than seven weeks early, to be exact.
Some premature babies are not that fortunate. According to a report by the Associated Press, three premature infants were found lying side by side in a hospital in the ravaged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, all of whom were left by their parents who couldn't care for them.
