In Nepal, when aid workers stopped coming, women and babies started dying

GAUR, Nepal — The young mother’s breath had grown ragged.

Inside her mud home in rural Nepal, she hunched over in agony, pain pummeling her pregnant belly, her swollen legs scarcely able to support her.

Kabita Mukhiya was in the midst of an emergency, but didn’t know it.

For weeks, she’d suffered at home, because there was nobody around to tell her to rush to a hospital.

The aid workers who once regularly visited her village to help pregnant women had stopped coming, after foreign aid cuts by the United States shuttered a program aimed at saving mothers’ and babies’ lives.

Kabita was uneducated and impoverished, and she did not know what was happening to her body.

In desperation, she turned at last to her aunt for help, who hauled her off to the hospital, where both women wept as the doctors said things neither could understand.

Which is why Kabita — confused and confined to her hospital bed — turned to something she could understand: prayer. “Please save the baby,” she begged God through her tears. “Please save me.” Then, through the chaos, came the words that Kab