14 DAY TRIAL // A Fijian soldier stationed at the British base in Helmand gave birth in Camp Bastion on Tuesday. There are about 500 British female soldiers in Afghanistan at this time, but this is the first time one of them delivered a child while on duty.
The 200 that found out they were pregnant, since 2003, have all been sent to Britain to carry their children to term in a more secure environment.
The soldier is a gunner in the Royal Artillery. In March, she arrived in Camp Bastion, where she joined the 12th Mechanised Brigade. She first started feeling pain and discomfort 2 days before she gave birth, the Daily Mail reports.
UK soldiers are trained before deployment, and have to be in condition to endure an eight-mile march and five-mile run before embarking on their mission. Upon arrival in Afghanistan, they face scorching heat and exhaustion.
As the doctors revealed that the woman's pregnancy was 34 weeks along, she must have been 3 months pregnant while being submitted to strenuous physical fitness tests.
As for the reason why she didn't realize that she was pregnant in the first place, doctors believe she wrote it off to the change in her schedule, diet and living conditions.
“But the conditions of deployment, the different diet, the heat of the Afghan summer, the different hours of working, mean that many soldiers feel a little odd and put it down to the change of environment,” a senior Army officer explained.
The mother, as well as her newborn, are healthy and have been well attended to at the technically advanced hospital in Camp Bastion. The hospital was equipped with portable X-ray machines, a state of the art operating theater, a CAT scanner and a large intensive care unit.
As a form of precaution, a team of doctors from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford is scheduled to travel to Afghanistan to check on the soldier's condition.