With health systems stretched, movement restrictions in place and concerns about disease exposure in health-care settings, mothers and midwives are risking their own health and lives to bring new life into the world. See more: unfpa.org/DeliverNow

UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, stands in solidarity with all those responding to the novel coronavirus: from the medical staff and volunteers bravely tending to the sick, to the bus drivers and care-workers who have been catapulted onto the front line of the response. And we grieve with the growing number of those who have lost loved ones in the greatest global health crisis in a century.

Full statement

This International Women's Day, UNFPA mourns the tragic loss of three heroic midwives amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.