by YOHANA DE ANDRADE
(WNN) São Paulo, BRAZIL: It was a rainy Wednesday late afternoon when pregnant Ana Cristina realized it was time to get ‘to know’ her unborn son João. She went to the Maternity Hospital Leonor Mendes de Barros in hopes of an easy delivery. Despite the pain and restlessness, Ana stood quietly for four hours waiting for care. “It’s a scandal that they treat you badly,” she said. After waiting so many hours with her mother, Ana was informed that there were no vacancies and she should find another place to have her son.
She called her brother and asked for help. They would have make it across São Paulo city to go to another facility, the Irmandade da Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo, the famous teaching hospital in Santa Casa renowned in Brazil for its quality of health care, despite its enormous amount of patients.
Finally, by one a.m. the next morning Ana met her newborn son João, her first child.
Many women face the happiness of their baby’s arrival with a fear of dying, along with the desire to care for their child and also to be cared for by their medical team. They have confidence in the hospital as the safest place to have a child. But they also carry the suspicion that their delivery can be abused by impunity and deceptive medical ethics by some medical teams.
Some women OB/GYN patients hear humiliating phrases from their medical providers during the process of childbirth, such as:
“Aren’t you too old to be having a baby?”
“If you don’t shut your mouth…”
“It didn’t hurt to make it, right?”
“You didn’t close your legs then, now deal with it!”
Often women patients do their best not to complain and to follow the orders of the medical team. “I’m [working] with the contraction, I did not give a peep, I bite, I pulled my hand…” said one new mother describing her courage during her time in labor.
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