And in a country where people die every day from suicide bombers or roadside bombs, a new life begins almost every hour inside the center’s sunlit wards.

Women, most of them poor, travel for miles over rough roads through treacherous territory to give birth at the center. Many have abandoned government or private clinics, where patients often have to pay up front or provide their own medicine and food.

Others are drawn by the free care and open-door policy of the center, run by the Italian charity Emergency. And many say they prefer to be treated by women.

Eman Youszai, 26, pregnant with her first child, had been driven three hours to the center. Lying on a bed in an observation room, she said she had left a maternity hospital in Kabul, the capital, because “no one takes care of you there even if you die.”