The midwife knew what was happening before the monitors confirmed it. The woman had come in pale, exhausted, her iron levels so depleted that what should have been a routine delivery had become a race against haemorrhage. In the end, her twins were stillborn.
“We thought the main issue for her complications in birth was the iron, folic acid and other nutrition items… the scarcity, the malnutrition of the mother,” says a health professional in Afghanistan working on maternal and child health, who asked not to be named because of the political sensitivities of working with the Taliban-run health system.
