Heat, Flood, Fire: The Climate Crisis and the Body

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Ms. Sadia Khalid, a Scientist-Physician (MBBS, MD) at Tallinn University of Technologye. She is affiliated with the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

Reproductive health is routinely discussed as a private matter: pregnancy, contraception, and childbirth. But in war, climate disaster, and political collapse, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a measure of whether societies still recognise women and girls as fully human. Too often, it becomes the first need neglected and the last restored.

Across conflicts and humanitarian emergencies, a pattern repeats. When bombs fall, floodwaters rise, or borders close, reproductive health services are treated as secondary to “more urgent” needs. Yet a woman in obstructed labour, a girl raped during displacement, or a survivor needing emergency contraception is not facing a side issue. She is facing an emergency.

This is why reproductive health must be understood through the wider architecture of crisis. Climate change, war, and political turmoil do not produce separate crises. They interact. Heatwaves worsen dehydration in pregnancy. Famine raises miscarriage rates and maternal exhaustion. Sieges cut off anaesthesia and blood products. Mass displacement strips women of privacy, sanitation, and continuity of care. The result is not only the collapse of services, but the collapse of bodily autonomy itself.
Nowhere is this clearer than in prolonged settings of violence and deprivation. Reproductive health does not fail all at once. It erodes in layers. Clinics become unreachable. Staff are displaced or detained. Supply chains fracture. Specialist care disappears. Women give birth without pain relief, skilled attendants, or safe referral pathways. Babies arrive too early, too small, while neonatal care becomes scarce.

But reproductive harm in crisis is not limited to pregnancy. Menstrual hygiene becomes a daily humiliation when women must improvise pads or wash with unsafe water. Contraception disappears. Safe abortion becomes logistically impossible. Sexual violence increases, while reporting mechanisms and trauma-sensitive care remain weak or non-existent.

Women and girls who survive conflict-related sexual violence encounter systems profoundly unequipped to care for them. Barriers are not only medical but structural: stigma, lack of interpreters, fragmented services, and time-sensitive care delayed by bureaucracy. Even where services exist on paper, the burden is placed on survivors to navigate trauma with administrative precision.
The war in Ukraine exposed this contradiction sharply. European states opened their borders, but health systems were not uniformly prepared to meet the reproductive and sexual health needs of survivors. Systems built around ordinary referrals and stable residency rules are poorly suited for displaced women arriving after rape, coercion, or interrupted care. In practice, women faced delays, patchy information, and uneven access.

Climate change is deepening this unreadiness. Disasters linked to extreme weather increasingly resemble conflict in their health consequences: displacement, food insecurity, water scarcity, interrupted contraception, and increased gender-based violence. When climate shocks interact with armed conflict, the harms multiply.

This extreme erosion of reproductive autonomy is not confined to war zones or climate disasters. It also flourishes in the hidden spaces of cults, closed communities where charismatic leaders wield absolute control over women’s bodies. In these environments, the decision of when to have a child, perhaps the most fundamental choice in a woman’s life, is stripped away entirely. Some cult leaders force pregnancies as a demonstration of dominance; others impose abortions to eliminate distractions from service. Women’s bodies become tools of control, sexually assaulted, beaten, starved, and impregnated at the leader’s whim. Mothers are separated from children, bonds deliberately severed to redirect all loyalty toward the group. To survive such violence, women learn to dissociate from their own bodies, silencing themselves, suppressing their instincts, and enduring punishment as a twisted path to spiritual worth. Whether in conflict zones, climate-induced displacement, or the locked doors of a cult compound, the pattern is the same: women’s reproductive lives become a currency of power, and the most intimate decisions are turned into instruments of control.

Beneath these visible crises lies a deeper structural failure. When profit is prioritised over people, reproductive health is defunded, the planet is burned, and women pay the price for both. The same capitalist logic that treats the earth as an infinite resource to be extracted treats women’s bodies as sites of control rather than sovereignty. In this system, both become expendable.

A better response requires redesigning reproductive healthcare as essential crisis infrastructure. That means mobile maternal care, not only hospital-based models. It means pre-positioning contraception, post-rape care, and clean birth kits where crises are likely to erupt. It means building one-stop survivor pathways that combine gynaecological care, forensic support, and long-term counselling. It means training all frontline providers in trauma-informed care. And it means establishing legal firewalls so survivors can seek treatment without fear of detention or deportation.

Most importantly, it requires rejecting the idea that reproductive health can wait until “after the emergency.” For millions of women and girls, there is ‘no’ after. Crisis is continuous. War lasts for years. Climate disasters return every season. A system that treats reproductive care as optional under those conditions is not neutral. It is participating in the harm.

The real question is not whether reproductive health belongs at the centre of disaster and conflict response. It is why it has remained at the margins for so long. Until health systems, humanitarian agencies, and governments answer that honestly, women and girls will continue to pay with their bodies for crises they did not create.

About the author

Sadia Khalid is a Scientist-Physician (MBBS, MD) at Tallinn University of Technology. She is driven by a commitment to advance public health and scientific understanding. With research interests spanning molecular medicine, infectious diseases, bacteriology, hepatology, and gastroenterology, she aims to contribute meaningful, evidence-based insights that support health, safety, and community awareness.