As of March 2015, Ebola had infected more than 23,900 people, killing more than 40% of them. As fears escalated throughout the affected region, pregnant women faced a particularly dramatic toll. Many were turned away from basic care on the mere suspicion of an infection, and even in previous outbreaks it appeared that those who contracted the disease had incredibly low chances of survival. These impacts threatened to wipe out major improvements made to maternal care in the past decade and a half in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and were predicted to result in 120,000 maternal deaths by the end of the year with lasting effects to the health of the nation. In a stirring narrative, Erika lays out the difficult challenges health care providers face and some of the ways organizations such as Doctors Without Borders were trying to grapple with the problem.
