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A recent UNICEF report revealed that children are displaced, injured or killed with alarming frequency by conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. The numbers make for horrific reading: more than 12 million children were reported displaced during conflicts in the region in less than two years, more than 40,000 were maimed, and almost 20,000 killed.

This equates to one child displaced every five seconds, and one child killed or maimed every 15 minutes.

If the parents of the children included in the report survived, they face a lifetime of misery and guilt. It is all too common to see devastated parents sobbing uncontrollably, wishing they could have swapped places so their children could have lived instead of them. This survivor’s guilt they go through makes their very existence unbearable. Parents all over the world constantly have doubts and regrets about raising their children, especially if they come to harm: What could they have done differently to prevent it?

In 2001, I was in the offices of the South London Press and Mercury, where I began my career as a journalist, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a woman, clearly in distress.

“Can you help me?” she asked. “My daughter went missing two weeks ago and no one seems to care; no one is helping me.” Throughout the following year I worked closely with her, hoping to reunite mother and daughter. What we did not know was that the 13-year-old was already dead.

She had left her home to go window shopping in a nearby high street, after receiving a call from a man named Robert Howard who abducted and murdered her. Howard turned out to be a suspected murderer and convicted sex offender with a long list of offenses to his name. After the girl’s decomposed body was found in undergrowth, her mother said she had often wondered whether she could have done something to prevent her daughter’s murder. What if she had gone to the shops with her that day? What if she had told her she had to stay at home?

Of course, she always reached the same conclusion: If she had had gone with her daughter or told her she could not go, it was likely the outcome would have been very different. It is very possible there would have been no murder.

Her daughter would probably still be alive. Hindsight is very good at making parents, and especially mothers, feel this way. If there is one principle in life relating to mortality that most people will agree is reasonable, it is that parents should never outlive their children. Nor should they cause them any form of harm.

Throughout my career I have spoken to many grief-stricken parents, most notably mothers, who one after the other have spoken about how they regularly play through the tragic events in their minds and wonder whether they could have done something differently to save their child. Invariably, the answer to the question is a resounding “no.”

How could they have predicted their child would be stabbed by a classmate, die in their sleep, be hit by a car or take their own life? This does not stop them from asking the question. And it is mothers, certainly the ones I have met, who feel the closest bond with their children. They carried the child for nine months. Joined by a cord, they were one; what the mother consumed, so did her unborn child.

It is not uncommon for women who suffer a miscarriage to feel guilt, believing they somehow failed in their role of creating a life. What we tend to forget is that becoming pregnant is not a simple process, and the success of a pregnancy is never guaranteed.

If there is one principle in life relating to mortality that most people will agree is reasonable, it is that parents should never outlive their children.

Peter Harrison

Any suggestion that a woman might somehow have failed in her duties as a mother if her child comes to harm is yet another layer of guilt that women all around the world are often forced to endure. Decisions regarding a child’s health and well-being, including vaccination strategy, are made in many families primarily by the mother.

In the 1990s, when a report suggested there might be a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, many parents felt they were left in what seemed to be a catch-22 situation: do they vaccinate their child and risk autism, or refuse the vaccine and risk the child succumbing to a potentially dangerous disease.

Even after the report was widely discredited, many mothers still felt unsure about what they should do. Even now, despite reassurances from most medical experts, some people still question whether they should vaccinate their children or accept the risk of serious illness.

And once again, many of the women I have spoken to about this issue speak of the immense worry and guilt they experienced when faced with making the decision.

Recent events in the US have put even more pressure on mothers. During pregnancy, many women, especially older mothers-to-be, suffer pain but have little choice in the painkillers they can take, as most can harm an unborn child.

They are most commonly told to take the drug acetaminophen (known in some countries as paracetamol) for pain relief.

Recently, US President Donald Trump and members of his administration stated that Tylenol (a leading American brand of acetaminophen) poses a risk of causing autism in unborn children, and told pregnant women to avoid it. The consensus among medical experts is that there is little-to-no credible scientific evidence for this supposed “finding,” which comes as the Trump administration questions the increase in recent years of autism diagnoses.

Once again, rather than reassure women that they are not harming their children by taking medication, which extensive testing has found to be safe, to help reduce the pain they are feeling, the matter has created confusion and uncertainty.

Autism was formally recognized and defined in 1943, though it had been identified and studied for decades before then. There have been countless cases of misdiagnosis of autism; indeed, only in recent years has it even been recognized that girls can have autism. The most likely reason for the apparent increase in the number of cases of autism in recent years is that it was previously underreported, and more cases are now identified because understanding of the condition has grown.

The irony here seems to be that in an age when information is more freely available than ever before, women are fed increasing amounts of misinformation, with little evidence, which increases their fear that they are responsible for things that, in reality, are largely out of their control.

• Peter Harrison is a senior editor at Arab News in the Dubai office. He has covered the Middle East for more than 15 years. X: @PhotoPJHarrison