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20% who are entering Pakistan are pregnant
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Bracing for a massive influx of Afghan women fleeing into Pakistan -- as many as 20 percent of them pregnant -- United Nations officials yesterday said they need help providing basic hygiene and reproductive health care to more than a million refugee women this winter.
Dr. Oliver Brasseur, who coordinates refugee relief efforts for the United Nations Population Fund, told reporters by phone from Pakistan that he is seeing women arriving in Pakistan "in total misery and exhaustion."
Six clinics for women in Afghanistan operated by international groups, including the U.N., are now cut off from their organizations.
Pam DeLargy, manager of the U.N. Population Fund's humanitarian response group, said many of the women fleeing to Iran or Pakistan arrive with infections from miscarriages. Others are victims of sexual violence and need emergency obstetric care or blood transfusions. Still others require basic hygiene or nutrients like iron to preserve their health.
One basic need is a home-delivery kit, containing a clean plastic sheet, a razor to cut the umbilical cord and string to tie it off, she said. Ninety-nine percent of births to Afghan women are unattended.
Of 23 million people in Afghanistan, 5.7 million are women between the childbearing ages of 15 and 49; 1.1 million of them are pregnant. Even before the war, Afghan women had the second-highest maternal mortality rate; the average life expectancy is 44. One of every four Afghan children dies before the age of 1.
Almost all of the 1,200 refugees who slip through the mountains into Pakistan each day are women and children and the elderly because most men are at war, Brasseur said. Since the U.S. bombing began, 60,000 Afghans have fled into Pakistan.
This has prompted the U.N. Population Fund to undertake the largest humanitarian mission in its history. It is trying to raise $4.5 million for immediate needs, including help for 2.5 million Afghans already in Pakistani refugee camps, and $20 million to get supplies ready for women who flee into Pakistan in coming months. Such an effort is separate from the general refugee assistance provided by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Brasseur said the situation is "increasingly worrisome as winter gets closer."
Phyllis Oakley, former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration and now a board member of the U.S. committee for the U.N. Population Fund, said "there will be huge health problems" because so many of these refugees haven't eaten properly for months or years.