[NEIGHBORS] The cost of daughters

I have three daughters. People smile when they hear that — Tres Marias. An old belief says a household of three girls is lucky. Blessed with daughters.

I watch them fix each other’s hair before school, argue over who gets to wear the new outfit, exchange lip gloss like treasure, and beg me to finally allow them to put on nail polish. I know how fiercely they protect one another. I know the softness they carry and the strength that quietly follows it.

Blessed.

But this March, while the world celebrates women and girls, I find myself thinking of mothers who once believed they were lucky too.

Until their daughters left for school and did not return.

At the beginning of this month dedicated to honoring women, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, during morning class. Walls collapsed. Desks overturned. Backpacks lay in dust and blood. A small green dress lay beneath fragments of the roof. Iranian state media reported that up to 168 people, most of them girls aged seven to 12, were killed.

The timing makes the tragedy sharper.

The United Nations marks March 8 as International Women’s Day under the theme “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.” It calls on the world to move beyond celebration — to close justice gaps, confront violence, and make rights real.

And yet, somewhere, a classroom full of girls never made it home.

War is often debated in maps and strategy rooms. But it does not land evenly. United Nations reporting shows that women and children make up the majority of civilian casualties in many recent conflicts. A 2025 UN Women report warns that 676 million women now live within 50 kilometers of deadly conflict — the highest number in decades. Civilian casualties among women and children have quadrupled in just two years, and conflict-related sexual violence has surged dramatically.

This is not incidental. It is patterned.

War reaches women not only through explosions, but through erasure. In Afghanistan, girls have been barred from secondary and university education, their futures narrowed by decree. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, investigations documented sexual violence used deliberately to terrorize communities. Across conflict zones, women lose access to healthcare, schooling for their children, and economic survival.

In Gaza, thousands of children have been killed over the course of the conflict, many of them girls — a toll that continues to shape families even as the fighting pauses. Sama Tabil was eight when stress from constant bombardment caused her hair to fall out. She was not physically wounded, but trauma marked her body. “I used to love combing my hair,” she said.

In Sudan, an eight-year-old girl fled her burning village, dodging bullets and sleeping under trees with her family. At the refugee camp, there was no medicine for her brother and barely any food. Clutching a worn teddy bear, she whispered that she missed school and breakfast with her grandmother. Most of all, she could not forget “the sound the houses made when they fell.”

In Myanmar, a 12-year-old girl escaped a raid with her baby brother, wading barefoot through monsoon mud. When aid workers found her, she had not eaten in days. She stayed silent for weeks. Until one night she whispered, “My brother stopped crying. I thought he was dead.” Now in a refugee camp, she draws birds, always flying away, always alone.

Different conflicts, different flags, different justifications, and yet the pattern repeats. Women and children absorb the greatest consequences: crowding evacuation centers, filling refugee camps, buried beneath rubble. Mothers rebuild from ruins. They become the frontline casualties, silently bearing the cost of decisions made in rooms far from their shattered homes. War does not only kill; it reshapes the trajectory of women’s lives long after ceasefires are declared.

I remember sharing with my fellow moms my fear about the war that had just erupted. They said it would be fine — it’s happening far from the Philippines. But war is never entirely distant anymore. Conflict reshapes economies, fuels instability, and travels through supply chains and screens. Beyond geopolitics, there is something quieter: awareness. In an interconnected world, we watch safety collapse in real time. A school can be safe one moment and shattered the next.

It is fragile to be the mother of daughters in a world like this. Sometimes that fear reveals itself in unexpected ways.

Once, someone asked me why I love climbing mountains. I answered without hesitation: because if war ever erupts, I want to be strong enough to carry my daughters up. Strong enough to climb. Strong enough to hide. Strong enough to survive.

I said it half-laughing. But I meant it.

Perhaps this is the cost of awareness — to hold gratitude and grief in the same breath.

Motherhood is borderless. A mother running through smoke in Minab feels the same panic any mother would feel. That instinct does not recognize nationality or religion. It recognizes only the child in front of her.

If Women’s Month is to mean anything beyond symbolism, it must confront this truth: women and children are not accidental casualties of war. They are its most predictable victims.

And yet women remain largely absent from the tables where peace is negotiated. Research consistently shows that when women participate meaningfully, peace agreements are more likely to endure. This is not about claiming women are inherently more peaceful. It is about power — about ensuring that those who bear war’s greatest costs have a voice in deciding whether conflict begins and how it finally ends.

No cause can justify a system that makes women pay the highest price for wars they did not start.

People call me lucky — Tres Marias. And I am.

But luck should not decide which daughters grow up, and which are remembered.

Peace is not simply when the bombing stops. It is when girls can learn without fear and mothers can sleep without listening for sirens. It is when women’s lives are no longer treated as collateral damage in political calculations. It is when childhood is not shaped by the sound of conflict but by the promise of possibility.

This International Women’s Month, may we do more than celebrate. May we demand justice. May we insist on action. May we make rights real.

May our daughters live. May our sons grow without inheriting the language of war too soon.

And may the cost of loving our children never again be fear — least of all for our daughters. – Rappler.com

Sarah Bautista-Abano is a wife and mother of three daughters. An advocate for the environment and human rights, she also spends time climbing mountains — a pursuit that reminds her of both strength and perspective. After leaving a corporate career to focus on full-time motherhood, she eventually started her own business.