Thousands of babies are being born in war-ravaged Ukraine, frequently in bomb shelters and nearly all without a typical hospital delivery experience. Whether affected by the location of their birth or the scarcity of important medical supplies, the situation for newborns in Ukraine is particularly dire. Jane Chen, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Embrace Global, hopes to help by providing 3,000 specially designed incubators as soon as possible.
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Making a terrible situation worse, many are born prematurely, which adds an additional layer of risk to their already precarious situation. “Since the war started, it’s estimated that the premature birth rate has more than doubled in major cities across the country,” reads Chen’s GoFundMe page.
Premature births, according to the World Health Organization, includes babies born before 37 weeks of gestational age. Their needs include warmth, frequent feeding and special care to prevent infections. Embrace Global’s portable incubators would go a long way toward addressing at least one of those pressing needs.
According to Embrace Global’s site, traditional incubators require a stable supply of electricity, which makes them particularly hard to use in a bombed-out city (or village). However, “the core technology of the Embrace incubator is a phase-change-material, a wax like substance, which when melted, can maintain a constant temperature of 98 degrees for up to eight hours at a stretch.” The wax pouch that Embrace Global’s portable incubators use for warmth can be reheated thousands of times in the same sleeping bag, creating a “warm micro-environment for the baby.”
Chen, a Stanford MBA with a master’s in public administration from Harvard, realized the need for villages to have portable, non-electrical incubators when she visited India in 2007. There she met a woman who had given birth prematurely, but the nearest hospital was 4 hours away. The village doctor told her that her child needed an incubator, but because she didn’t have the money to get herself and her baby to the hospital, her child died.
“Based on this story and dozens like it, my team and I realized what was needed was an incubator that could work in a village setting. It had to be portable, function without constant electricity, and be super easy to use,” Chen wrote. “We went to work brainstorming, prototyping and coming up with hundreds of iterations of our idea. Through this process, the Embrace incubator was born.”
And because of it, premature children born in Ukraine and around the world have a fighting chance. Chen hopes to raise approximately $600,000 to make, transport and deliver 3,000 portable incubators to mothers and their infants in Ukraine. At the time of this publication, she’d reached approximately a third of her goal—and the first shipment of incubators is on its way to UNICEF. To donate, go to the Embrace Global GoFundMe page.
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