ABU DHABIi // Jasmine Collin had to travel all the way from the UAE back to the UK just so she could give birth at home.
Her decision meant having her baby at her mother's home after a month apart from her husband, a time the 38-year-old mother from Abu Dhabi calls the "most difficult of her pregnancy".
Having a baby at home may seem like a step back in time: just a few decades ago all babies in the Emirates were born at home because there was no option.
Fans of the practice say it makes the experience of giving birth more intimate, allowing the mother to control the process instead of following doctors' orders.
"It was amazing and I wouldn't have been able to have that opportunity if I was here," said Mrs Collin.
Two of Mrs Collin's friends are in the UK so that they too can have home births.
"I know hundreds of women here who would like to have the option of a home birth," said Kate Greenstock, an educator and doula (non-medical childbirth assistant) in the capital. "There is a lot of misunderstanding about home birth. It is as least as safe as, if not safer than, a hospital birth."
Home births are discouraged in the country because of a lack of infrastructure and personnel. Midwives in the UAE are permitted to work only in hospitals.
In many countries where home births are not discouraged, the mother must be assisted by an experienced professional, such as a midwife, who has had years of medical training.
The concern is that without prompt medical intervention, complications can become catastrophes. Further, home births are not recommended for high-risk pregnancies.
According to the World Health Organisation, the Emirates has 54 deaths for every 100,000 births. That is well below the average of 370 per 100,000 across the Eastern Mediterranean region but above rates in some western nations, such as five per 100,000 in Canada, and 14 per 100,000 in the US.
But even if they do not want to have their babies at home, some women in the UAE say they should be given the choice.
Hamda al Mansouri, a 25-year-old Emirati, is pregnant with her first child and plans to give birth in a hospital.
She said giving birth at home sounds frightening, because "we don't know what will happen to the mother". In a hospital, she said, "the doctor can act to protect her".
However, Ms al Mansouri added that "the Government needs to give women the choice". Even though Nada Mousa Alraeei's mother and grandmothers gave birth at home, the 27-year-old Emirati said that when it is her time she will choose the hospital.
"Nowadays we have hospitals where it is clean and they will take care of all the things that will happen," she said.
But she also endorses the idea of a mother being able to decide.
"Some families have a grandmother in the house to help," she said. "In the UAE it should be the mother's choice."
Yousra Adil, a 22-year-old Emirati television presenter, would prefer to give birth at home.
She said: "There is something about home birth. I think I'd say it's classical; there is a romantic thought to the idea, it's so intimate."
She worries that in a hospital mothers are treated as just another patient.
"At home you feel special," she said. "This doctor is coming just for you and for your baby. Your family is around you, your husband is focused just on you and everything is about you and the baby."
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The National in Davos
We are bringing you the inside story from the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, a gathering of hundreds of world leaders, top executives and billionaires.
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Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
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1. Dubai silk road
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6. Free economic and creative zones in universities
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9: Annual growth in philanthropy
MATCH INFO
Day 2 at the Gabba
Australia 312-1
Warner 151 not out, Burns 97, Labuschagne 55 not out
Pakistan 240
Shafiq 76, Starc 4-52
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
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Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
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Cricket World Cup League 2
UAE squad
Rahul Chopra (captain), Aayan Afzal Khan, Ali Naseer, Aryansh Sharma, Basil Hameed, Dhruv Parashar, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Farooq, Muhammad Jawadullah, Muhammad Waseem, Omid Rahman, Rahul Bhatia, Tanish Suri, Vishnu Sukumaran, Vriitya Aravind
Fixtures
Friday, November 1 – Oman v UAE
Sunday, November 3 – UAE v Netherlands
Thursday, November 7 – UAE v Oman
Saturday, November 9 – Netherlands v UAE
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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Pakistan squad
Sarfraz (c), Zaman, Imam, Masood, Azam, Malik, Asif, Sohail, Shadab, Nawaz, Ashraf, Hasan, Amir, Junaid, Shinwari and Afridi
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
