Woman denied care, gives birth on clinic lawn

An indigenous woman gave birth on a medical clinic lawn after a nurse reportedly turned her away, horrifying Mexicans and raising questions of inequality.

|
Chema Alvarez/AP
Irma Lopez stands next to her newborn son Salvador at a clinic in the town of Jalapa de Diaz, Mexico, Oct. 6. Mexico officials have suspended a health center director after Lopez, an indigenous woman, was denied entry to his clinic and was forced to give birth on the lawn.

An indigenous woman squats in pain after giving birth, her newborn still bound by the umbilical cord and lying on the ground. It's a photograph that horrified Mexicans because of where it took place: the lawn outside a medical clinic where the woman had been denied help, and it struck a nerve in a country where inequity is still pervasive.

The government of the southern state of Oaxaca announced yesterday that it has suspended the health center's director, Dr. Adrian Cruz, while officials conduct state and federal investigations into the Oct. 2 incident.

The mother, Irma Lopez, 29, told The Associated Press that she and her husband were turned away from the health center by a nurse who said she was only eight months pregnant and "still not ready" to deliver.

The nurse told her to go outside and walk, and said a doctor could check her in the morning, Lopez said. But an hour and a half later, her water broke, and Lopez gave birth to a son, her third child, while grabbing the wall of a house next to the clinic.

"I didn't want to deliver like this. It was so ugly and with so much pain," she said, adding she was alone for the birth because her husband was trying to persuade the nurse to call for help.

A witness took the photo and gave it to a news reporter. It ran in several national newspapers, including the full front page of a tabloid, and was widely circulated on the Internet.

The case illustrated the shortcomings of maternal care in Mexico, where hundreds of women still die during or right after pregnancy. It also pointed to the persistent discrimination against Mexico's indigenous people.

"The photo is giving visibility to a wider structural problem that occurs within indigenous communities: Women are not receiving proper care. They are not being offered quality health services, not even a humane treatment," said Mayra Morales, Oaxaca's representative for the national Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

The federal Health Department said this week that it has sent staff to investigate what happened at the Rural Health Center of the village of San Felipe Jalapa de Diaz. The National Human Rights Commission also began an investigation after seeing news reports.

Lopez, who is of Mazatec ethnicity, said she and her husband walked an hour to the clinic from the family's one-bedroom hut in the mountains of northern Oaxaca. It would have taken them longer to get to the nearest highway to catch a ride to a hospital. She said that from the births of her two previous children, she knew she didn't have time for that.

Nearly one in five women in the state of Oaxaca gave birth in a place that is not a hospital or a clinic in 2011, according to Mexico's census. Health officials have urged women to go to clinics to deliver their babies, but many women say the operating hours of the rural centers are limited and staffs small. A receptionist at the Rural Health Center told the AP that the doctor in charge was not available to comment about the case.

Although some have praised Mexico for improving its maternal health care, the mortality rate still stands at about 50 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the World Health Organization, similar to Libya, Barbados and Kazakhstan. The U.S. rate is 16 per 100,000.

Oaxaca is one of Mexico's poorest, most rural states and many women have died of hemorrhaging or preeclampsia, a condition causing high blood pressure and possible kidney or liver failure. The Mexican states with the highest indigenous population have the highest rates of maternal deaths, by a wide margin.

Lopez was taken in by the clinic after giving birth and discharged the same day with prescriptions for medications and products that cost her about $30, she said. Health officials say she and her baby were in good health.

She said that poverty-stricken villagers are used to being forgotten by Mexico's health care system and left to fend off for themselves.

"I am naming him Salvador," said Lopez, a name that means "Savior" in English. "He really saved himself."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Woman denied care, gives birth on clinic lawn
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/1010/Woman-denied-care-gives-birth-on-clinic-lawn
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe