The immediate toll of the Russian airstrike that devastated a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last week was three people dead and 17 injured, but the impact did not stop there. In the AP photo that has come to symbolize the attack, a wounded pregnant woman lies on a stretcher, holding her lower belly and splattered with blood, being rushed out of the hospital by emergency workers seeking care for her elsewhere.
An injured pregnant woman is carried from the maternity hospital damaged by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 9. The woman and her baby subsequently died.
The attack was condemned worldwide. The World Health Organization issued a statement: "To attack the most vulnerable – babies, children, pregnant women, and those already suffering from illness and disease, and health workers risking their own lives to save lives – is an act of unconscionable cruelty."
WHO further pointed to the ongoing ripple effects such attacks pose by — limiting access to health care as well as potentially endangering those who seek it and also straining and threatening the viability of the health-care system itself.