The heat in a Lviv maternity hospital was overwhelming last month as Khrystyna Mnykh rocked her newborn daughter, Roksolana, in her arms and described her birth story.
An alarm had rung out days earlier as Mnykh, 28, was in labour, signalling the threat of a Russian strike on the western Ukrainian city.
“I had to go to the shelter, but I couldn’t because I had an epidural and couldn’t walk,” she said.
“But I was on one of the lower floors, so it was OK.”
Luckily, there were no missile strikes in the area that day, but the blaring siren that marked her daughter’s entrance to this world was a reminder of the new stresses facing women giving birth in a country at war.
Mothers, some of them from Lviv, but many of them displaced from elsewhere in the country, have come to this maternity hospital to give birth in the relative safety of this city. But even here, they cannot escape the war.
Mnykh said that weeks earlier, while she was still at home and heavily pregnant, an air defence system had intercepted a missile near her home, cracking its windows. She can hear rifles firing at the military cemetery across the street that pays tribute to the fallen soldiers buried there daily.
Liliya Myronovych, who has spent three decades as chief of the neonatal department at one of the city’s maternity hospitals, said they were still seeing many pregnant women coming from Ukraine’s besieged east to give birth.
“We have some women who lost their husbands during this war, some babies who will never meet their fathers,” she said.
“We try to give them all of the warmth of our hearts, but it is not what they expected. They expected there to be peace.”
“When this war started, it was very difficult for me, because all of my life I have spent creating life, helping babies,” said Myronovych, 64. “I couldn’t understand how men could destroy everything, in one moment, without any reason.”
Dariia Moskalenko, 24, who was recovering in a room across the hall after giving birth to a daughter a day earlier, is originally from the country’s eastern Donetsk region, the site of fighting since 2014, but moved to Kharkiv, in the north, seven years ago when she met her husband.
When the full-scale Russian attack began in February, she left him behind as she fled to Lviv.
He joined her there just in time to be present at their daughter’s birth. While they are eager to return to Kharkiv, that city has been ravaged by shelling. She said that for their daughter’s sake they would stay in Lviv.
For now, her thoughts are consumed by fears for her child’s future. She hopes that her daughter will never have to know the reality of this war — that by the time the fighting is over, she will still be too young to remember the hardship of it all.
Like other mothers, though, the happiness of seeing her newborn can momentarily eclipse the anxiety.
“When I look at my sweet baby,” Moskalenko said, “I stop thinking about everything else.” -- New York Times
The writer is an international correspondent at NYT
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