When Fatmata Kabia walked into the Ebola isolation center, her chances of survival were almost zero.
Not because her symptoms were particularly bad — though they were. Not because the disease had already killed most of her family — though it had. Kabia, 21, appeared doomed for another reason: She was pregnant.
Few diseases are less understood than the Ebola virus, which has claimed more than 7,900 lives across West Africa. But one thing is clear: Pregnant Ebola patients rarely survive. And their babies never do.
Even as doctors watched a succession of Ebola-stricken pregnant women die or lose their babies in recent months, they weren’t entirely sure why it was happening. Perhaps the mothers’ immune systems were weakened, making them more susceptible to the incapacitating fever that accompanies the disease, or maybe the virus pooled in fetal fluid. Some of the babies died early in pregnancy, others closer to term.
“There have been no neonatal survivors” is how Denise Jamieson, an obstetrician with the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, put it flatly.
Meratu Koroma, 18, four months pregnant, battles intense pain while waiting for an Ebola test in Port Loko, Sierra Leone. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
Kabia didn’t know that. She knew only that some time after the disease crossed the border from Guinea to Sierra Leone, it had arrived in her town, called Lunsar. Then it snaked into her home, where her mother, father and brother tested positive. And then she tested positive.
A few weeks later, when she walked out of the Port Loko Ebola isolation center — her test results negative, her baby growing in her belly — the epidemiologists had already started talking about her.
But Kabia faced six more months of pregnancy, six more months of potential battle with the disease. This time, though, it would be her baby’s fight, waged inside her.
“I’m just not sure what will happen,” she said.
Kabia is a small woman with big eyes and a wide smile. She rests her hands on her stomach when she sits and taps her sandal-clad feet on the ground. Sometimes, talking about the baby makes her nervous, like she’s waiting for the results of her Ebola test all over again.
She had become pregnant in August just as the disease started spreading rapidly across Sierra Leone. Kabia had already miscarried once, years before Ebola. She was so worried when she became pregnant this time that she didn’t tell her husband. One day, he pointed to her belly and asked: was she? Kabia told him, and they celebrated. He died a few weeks later.
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