Lipi Khanom, 28, lives in Kolibari, a village near the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest. She said that when the tide comes in, salt water often spills into her house and into a nearby pond where she used to bathe. For the past two years, she said she has dealt with irregular periods and pain in her lower abdomen. Khanom and her husband have also struggled to get pregnant with a second child.
As one of the most experienced midwives in the village, Shefali Bibi has seen firsthand how saltwater intrusion and malnutrition has imperiled pregnant women in her community. Midwife Shefali Bibi holds items from a vaginal delivery kit which she carries with her during home visits., a United States-based NGO that focuses on reproductive justice, found that global warming exacerbated existing gender inequalities and directly and indirectly affected women’s sexual health, pregnancy outcomes, contraceptive use and fertility intentions in Bangladesh and Mozambique, two climate-vulnerable countries.
“You might as a woman be forced to wade in waist-deep waters where you’re fishing for fingerlings to feed your family, and those rivers have been polluted not just by the cyclones and the destruction to the sanitation systems, but also by the sea levels rising and putting more and more salinization in the water,” she said. “That directly impacts their reproductive organs, causing infections, cancers and injury.”“There is not a single drop of fresh water in the entire area,” she said.
But the burden on some women can come long before climate-related health problems develop. Poor families may force their daughters to drop out of school to work, or opt to marry off their girls at young ages, in order to alleviate financial stress. Akhter said she herself stopped going to school and got married after Cyclone Aila, which hit Bangladesh in 2009, left her parents in a financial crisis.
Even during the monsoon season, households cannot save enough rainwater to last long periods of time.
The salt comes from the Bay of Bengal, where Bangladesh’s major rivers meet the sea. As global temperatures climb and the planet’s glaciers melt, the sea rises causing more saltwater to seep into freshwater, degrading ponds for washing, rivers for fishing, and soil for farming.