births

Khan Yunis: As monitors beep and doctors consult near them, two tiny newborns lie silently side-by-side, sharing a single incubator in a southern Gaza hospital running short on space and supplies.

Gaza’s youngest already face an extremely precarious entry into the world, given the dire humanitarian situation in the war-shattered territory that borders Israel and Egypt.

But for babies needing specialist care, such as those born prematurely, the road ahead is even more perilous.

“The situation is dire: there is no oxygen available for them, nor is there any spare incubators in the hospital,” said Hatem Dhahir, head of the neonatal department at Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis.

“We’re trying to transfer them to other hospitals, but they’re always full and the situation is very bad. Most of the children need oxygen and are very underweight, and things are going from bad to worse,” he told AFP.

The war between Israel and Hamas has devastated the Palestinian territory’s healthcare system, with many medical facilities rendered completely or partially unusable.

Ongoing Israeli restrictions on goods entering the Gaza Strip mean medical supplies and specialist equipment are also running low.

Dhahir said Nasser hospital had seen a significant increase in the number of premature births in recent months, as well as twins and triplets.

The influx was forcing staff to place two or even three babies in each incubator, he said.

In March, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA said that one in three pregnancies in Gaza were high-risk and 70 percent of newborns were premature or underweight.

Incubator sharing significantly increased mortality risks, it said.

‘No room’

Nearly the entirety of Gaza’s population was displaced at least once during the devastating war which started in October 2023.

The fighting flattened swathes of the territory, left hundreds of thousands of people living in tents and temporary shelters and shattered vital infrastructure such as sanitation and access to safe water.

Despite a US-backed ceasefire declared in October 2025, the Israeli military continues to target Palestinians it says are militants.

A UN-mandated inquiry published in June said that severe shortages of food, medical supplies, fuel and the collapse of healthcare services had an enormous impact on maternal health.

“Against this background, rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, low-birthweight infants and congenital defects have increased,” the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry said.

Heart conditions were among three types of congenital defects to have particularly increased, the commission said, citing medical practitioners.

In southern Gaza, Mona Ahmad was accompanying a baby taken to Nasser hospital in late August and diagnosed with a serious congenital defect in which the heart’s two main blood vessels are switched in position.

“We received a final report stating that the baby was suffering from transposed arteries and needed to be transferred, as there was absolutely no treatment available for her here,” Ahmad told AFP.

“The baby spent a full week in the neonatal unit and was discharged because there was no room for her there,” she added.

In a bid to revive Gaza’s neonatal care system, the UN children’s agency UNICEF has scaled up its work to supply medical equipment such as incubators, ventilators and monitors to hospitals.

Including work that began before the ceasefire, UNICEF has supplied 93 incubators to six facilities across the Gaza Strip.

But challenges remain immense and more needs to be done, said Toby Fricker, chief of advocacy and communications for UNICEF Palestine, following a visit to a neonatal intensive care unit in the territory.

For now, “through the pure… resilience of the doctors, of people, things are working,” he said.

BUENOS AIRES, Sept. 3 (UPI) — Argentina’s declining birth rate has drawn renewed attention after President Javier Milei linked the drop in births to the legalization of abortion during at least two public appearances over the past week.

Milei said Argentina’s population is no longer growing at a rate sufficient to ensure generational replacement because of what he called “that passion for murdering children in their mothers’ wombs.” He added that the trend is costing the country dearly in terms of economic growth and its pension system.

But demographic data and experts consulted by UPI challenge Milei’s assertion, noting that the decline began years before abortion was legalized and reflects broader economic and social factors.

Argentina’s birth rate began to fall in 2014, six years before the country legalized abortion in 2020.

According to official data released Wednesday by UNICEF Argentina, the number of births fell by nearly half over the past decade to 413,135 in 2024 from 777,012 in 2014. The fertility rate has reached its lowest level on record at 1.3 children per woman.

Argentina’s trend is part of a global phenomenon, though the decline has been more pronounced in the country. In 2024, Argentina recorded roughly the same number of births as in 1948, despite having three times as many women of reproductive age.

Sociologist and feminist historian Dora Barrancos said Milei’s argument is part of a broader narrative also found among far-right groups in other countries.

“There is a strong ideological focus on blaming feminists and their policies for the decline in the birth rate. From a historical perspective, that explanation has no basis,” she said.

Gala Díaz Langou, director of the International Panel on Social Progress, also rejected abortion as an explanation for the declining birth rate.

“That argument does not hold up. This is a global, multifaceted process,” she said.

Mariana Isasi, head of the United Nations Population Fund office in Argentina, said the declining birth rate reflects tensions between people’s personal aspirations, economic conditions and the way family life is organized.

A recent UNFPA survey on reproductive intentions in Argentina found that 57% of people between ages 18 and 45 would like to have more children.

“There is a gap between the number of children people have and the number they would like to have. This shows that the desire exists, but the conditions to do so are not always there,” Isasi said.

Isasi said conditions were not necessarily better in previous periods, but people today have more tools to make decisions about motherhood.

Uncertainty about the future is another factor influencing decisions about whether to have children. In addition, 20% of those surveyed said they had difficulty finding a suitable partner with whom to have children.

Isasi also noted that Argentina’s adolescent fertility rate has fallen by more than 50%.

“It is good news that teenage girls can continue their education without becoming mothers and can decide later whether they want to have children,” she said.

Another factor is the postponement of motherhood. The average age at which women in Argentina have their first child is 29.2.

“When motherhood is postponed, people may end up having fewer children over the course of their lives,” Isasi said.

Díaz Langou said some of the factors behind the falling birth rate represent positive changes, while others reflect economic and social difficulties.

Among the positive changes, she cited improvements in contraception that allow women’s reproductive decisions to better reflect their preferences and reduce unintended pregnancies.

Economic conditions and the cost of raising children, however, remain major concerns.

“Raising children is very expensive and is becoming increasingly costly because of the limited availability of public care services in Argentina. This is compounded by precarious employment conditions, which affect the real incomes of many people who have children,” Díaz Langou said.

The cost is also linked to the availability of care services. According to a recent analysis by La Cocina de los Cuidados, an intersectoral group focused on care policies, 48 of the 50 national care policies identified by the organization have been eliminated or defunded since December 2023.

The remaining policies have been repealed, cut back or dismantled under Milei’s administration.

Barrancos places the decline in births within a demographic process that began in the second half of the 19th century and reached Argentina by the end of that century.

She said women began to limit the number of children they had long before the expansion of feminism and the movement for women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies.

Barrancos rejected the idea that the decline in births can be attributed to feminism or the legalization of abortion and disputes that the trend represents a threat.

“There is nothing to fear. As the number of children women want to have declines, other forms of family are also growing, including same-sex families seeking to adopt. The alarmist rhetoric of the far right is incompatible with the historical evidence,” she said.