Centering the Protection of Maternity in Advocacy for Gendered Protections in Wartime

In recent years, attacks on maternity hospitals, fertility clinics, and women’s medical centers in sites of armed conflict are visible and undulating. In parallel, the structural violence of deliberate starvation, water deprivation, desalination destruction, and sewage pollution from military targeting harms mothers. This can be most particularly observed in Gaza, but it is also present in many conflict zones across the world.

Classic assumptions about where women are most vulnerable in war have centered around the practice of penetrative sexual violence. These assumptions are ill-equipped to address the systematic targeting of pregnant, labouring, post-partum, and nursing mothers.  We need to fundamentally reassess core imperatives driving the vaunted but largely ineffective  Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS). Not only has it been useless in protecting women from wartime sexual violence, but by monopolizing global narratives of harm, it has eclipsed the broader range of violence that women experience in conflict. 

I am not minimizing the widespread use of sexual violence as a method and means of war.  Nor am I arguing for less protection, accountability or justice for victims of rape.  But I am arguing that feminists and international justice mechanisms must widen their aperture and see the full panoply of harms experienced by women in war. This means we must recognize that maternal and obstetric violence is central to the methods and means of warfare perpetrated against women by both State and non-state actors.  The logic of military thinking appears, in multiple conflicts to use kinetic force against pregnant and nursing mothers in ways that are disproportionate and unnecessary. However, this force is increasingly married with broader conflict tactics, such as drone use, AI informed target selection, continual civilian targeting, constant displacement of the civilian population and destruction of civilian infrastructure. This violence leads to obstetric emergencies, higher miscarriage rates, more hemorrhages, lower birth rate and inability to nurse children post-partum.  All these outcomes negatively impact the survival rates of pregnant and childbearing women in conflict zones.

From contemporary conflicts such as Ukraine (with over 2,000 attacks on medical facilities), and Gaza, the rationale for systematic maternal and obstetric violence appear to be linked to the military objectives of territorial control, erasure of people and culture, and spreading fear and terror among the civilian population.  Maternity and childbearing are often lauded in traditional societies, and women are viewed as the symbolic heart of the ‘motherland’.   As such women as mothers are central to military strategies to displace and erase peoples from disputed territories.

The power of motherhood has been deeply challenging for feminist scholars, as we have struggled for decades to argue for reproductive rights, autonomy and independence for women and girls.  We face immense  backlash against  women’s human rights and equality, and the rise of ‘traditionalism’ and political populism intertwined.  And yet, many women (qualifiedly not all) continue to self-define as mothers, and view motherhood and maternal care as central to their identity, well-being, and human dignity.  The targeting of mothers as mothers by militaries is designed to destroy the identity and value of women as mothers.  In my earliest work on gender-based violence during the Holocaust, this was a primary conclusion I drew from the separation of mothers and children in ghettos and concentration camps.

Targeting women as mothers as well as mothers and children together is not new; it has been a feature of warfare since antiquity. What is new is a two-decade-old political focus on penetrative sexual violence in war, which has obscured the scale of maternal violence and harm occurring in the same theatre.

This occlusion is part of a longstanding concentration on high-profile, extraordinary violence against women. This narrow focus has diverted attention from the more regular violence that women routinely experience in conflict and post-conflict societies.  This misguided concentration also eclipses the connection between daily experiences of life cycle violence and cumulative violence that pervades conflict zones.

Given the unique protections set out in the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols for maternity, newly born and young  children under the law of war, it is notable that the international community has devoted so little effort to hold States and combatants accountable for their failure to implement these specific hard law obligations. It is also an indictment of the selectiveness of the WPS agenda that while rape in armed conflict makes headlines, obstetric violence against women and girls generally does not. 

So, how do we move the conversation, policy and norms forward? 

• First, policymakers, experts and scholars need to deploy a holistic and integrated approach to measuring and assessing the totality of targeted violence experienced by women in conflict zones.
• Second, we need to reevaluate the hierarchies of sexual harm in war that have emerged over the last two decades. They have not served us well. We need to recognize that they have served to obscure justice and accountability rather than advance it.  We need a different paradigm of harm that includes the maternal in how we account for the destruction of war.
• Third, civil society, policymakers and States must demand compliance with existing law of war protections for women and children. While law of war protections has not saved the women of Gaza and Ukraine from war crimes and other core crimes, documenting and naming explicit violations against mothers gives us the tools to seek accountability in the future.
• Finally, feminists must seriously reevaluate their affirmation of a WPS agenda whose focus on sexual violence has neither protected women from rape nor served to prevent violence and instead has provided cover for a plethora of equally egregious violence. We need to re-commit to a politics of peace that is not about making war ‘safe’ for women but instead prevents war and centers women’s full dignity and equality when violence occurs between and within States

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC Hons, MRIA, FBA; Professor of Law the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland