Despite War, Mothers in Ukraine Strive to Bring Forth New Life

For years now, war has ravaged Ukraine, lending to widespread chronic stress, ongoing displacement and general uncertainty about the future, not to mention the death of more than 140,000 soldiers, most of them men. Still, life finds a way. Despite maternal mortality rising by more than a third between 2023 and 2024, after Russia launched an unprovoked full-scale invasion of the country, births persist. “We must bring new life,” army medic and recent mother Iryna Dolhopolova told the New York Times. 

The toll of war is made clear in the efforts of Ukrainian mothers and physicians. Though nationwide statistics are currently unavailable, some hospitals still track numbers locally, and have reported a concerning trend: Premature births and miscarriages are on the rise. 

According to data from a hospital in the frontline city of Sumy, 5.5% of births were preterm last year, nearly doubling from 2.9% in 2021, the year before the war entered its current stage. In another frontline city, more newborns are born underweight or with jaundice as mothers navigate high blood pressure, sleeplessness and general overwhelm from the fighting. 

C-section births are also on the rise, determined as much by pauses in bombardment as medical necessity, since hospitals aren’t immune from attack. As of December 2025, more than 80 maternity and neonatal care hospitals in Ukraine had been damaged or destroyed, according to data from the United Nations. In some places, staff have been forced to move labor and delivery into basement bomb shelters. In other cities, there are no maternity wards remaining at all. 

And still, mothers insist that the babies keep coming. Aliona Ponomarenko, who has the psychologically taxing job of clearing land mines, lost a much-desired pregnancy with her husband in 2022 and the pair planned to try again, but then he was killed in action. She decided to have a baby girl anyhow, Alisa — not fathered by the man she loved — born early at 30 weeks, weighing almost three and a half pounds. “I want a child,” Ponomarenko said.

Choosing motherhood in the middle of war is its own quiet refusal to let the war win: An insistence that the future still belongs to them and the children they battle to bring into it.

See also our recent stories from Ukraine by correspondent Cecilia Nowell: Ukrainian Vet Amputees Seek Healing With Yoga ‘To Feel the Connection With Themselves Again” and ‘When We Save One Medic, They Will Save 100 Lives.’

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