In the first week of July, staff members at the Suuqa Xoolaha Center for Mothers and Children, a hospital in southern Somalia, closed its doors and locked its high front gate.

Funding from the United States, which paid for salaries and medical supplies, had been cut by the Trump administration, and the aid organization that managed the hospital fired the doctors, midwives and other workers.

But word of the closure didn’t reach everyone who needed to know. Khadija Ali, 25, arrived at the hospital a few days later, from a camp for displaced people outside the city. She was in the late stage of labor, accompanied by her aunt.

She pounded on the door, crying and saying she was afraid she might die if she could not deliver her child inside. Somalia has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.

Her labor was too far progressed for them to go anywhere else, her aunt, Habiba Ali, said. And they had no money; this was the only hospital they knew that offered free maternal care. Ms. Ali began to give birth outside the hospital door. The commotion woke neighbors, who carried her into their home, where she delivered a healthy baby girl.

Word of Ms. Ali’s traumatic midnight birth spread quickly among the fired hospital workers.

Khadija Noor Adan, a nurse-midwife at the hospital, was aghast when she heard the story. She resolved that she wasn’t going to sit at home any longer, job or no job, when women were giving birth in the street.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.