Bilquis Edhi took care of abandoned children in cradles at the Edhi orphanage in Karachi in 2010. Over the years, thousands of children have been left behind in a network of cradles outside the centers. Edhi centers she established throughout Pakistan.
Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
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Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
Bilquis Edhi took care of abandoned children in cradles at the Edhi orphanage in Karachi in 2010. Over the years, thousands of children have been left behind in a network of cradles outside the centers. Edhi centers she established throughout Pakistan.
Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
Bilquis Edhi, a prominent Pakistani humanitarian, passed away in Karachi on Friday at the age of 74.
Edhi stood by her late husband Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of Pakistan’s most famous corporation social service networkand is the main force helping the poorest people in Pakistan, especially women and children.
As a trained nurse, she runs maternity clinics and sets up baby cots outside of Edhi Foundation centers across Pakistan, where women who give birth can remain anonymous to their newborn baby, knowing that they will be taken care of.
“Don’t kill,” handwritten signs above the cradles. “Leave the baby alive in the cradle. Don’t kill the baby… Let the baby live.”
Bilquis Edhi and her husband Abdul Sattar Edhi sit together in Karachi in 2010.
Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
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Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
Bilquis Edhi and her husband Abdul Sattar Edhi sit together in Karachi in 2010.
Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
“Most of the babies left in the cribs on our doorstep are girls,” Bilquis Edhi told NPR’s Julie McCarthy in 2009. “Sometimes babies are thrown in the trash, gagged and wrapped in plastic bags.”
Over the years, the Edhis have helped put thousands of babies – and older children – into adoption families in Pakistan, earning Bilquis Edhi the nickname “the mother of Pakistan.” On Friday, her son Faisal Edhi told Pakistani news channel Geo, “We will continue our mother’s mission.”
On Twitter, Shahbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s new prime minister, called Edhi’s death “a great loss to the nation.”
The passing of Bilquis Edhi is a great loss to the nation. What an incredible woman she stood by Edhi sb. like a rock and together they set an example of human kindness and run one of the largest charities in the world. May her soul rest in peace!
– Shehbaz Sharif (@CMShehbaz) April 15, 2022
She and her husband for five decades lived on the grounds of their organization’s office in inner-city Karachi, overseeing a network of services that included ambulances, emergency relief, and homeless shelters. shelters, orphanages, burying unclaimed bodies, animal camps and blood banks.
Despite death threats and attacks on their services, the couple remains dedicated to their charity work. Baby cradles remain under criticism from religious conservatives, who say their presence encourages births out of wedlock.
“They called him an infidel, saying he didn’t say his prayers,” Bilquis talks about her husband’s critics in 2015. “What we are doing should be done by the government and should be appreciated, but instead we are blamed.”
After Abdul Sattar Edhi’s death in 2016, Bilquis Edhi and their children continued the philanthropic network that began shortly after Pakistan’s founding in 1947 as a one-man ambulance service in Karachi. She was a young nurse when she and her husband married in 1966.
“Everybody said I was crazy to marry him,” Bilquis Edhi told NPR’s McCarthy. “Friends joked that while they were having a picnic, he would take me to the graveyard.”
