We shouldn't act like child-trafficking in hospitals is new
What you need to know:
- The nursing staff won’t or can’t work despite being on a salary, and will not let others work, claiming they’re not qualified. Something deeply rotten is going on here.
- Kenya is creating or maybe has already created a Homer G. Phillip Hospital situation as the city fathers sit pretty, watch and point fingers here and there.
- At Homer, staff took advantage of poor black women to steal their babies and lied to them that their new-borns had died.
A maternity experience is supposed to be a tremendous milestone in the life of a woman, when she brings forth life to the world.
After childbirth the joy of a new baby spreads to the father, the extended family and the community.
Some women who have attended the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, which is Kenya’s largest and only obstetric referral hospital, have come out of the experience traumatised, disillusioned and with babies alleged to be dead, but whose bodies cannot be accounted for.
Pumwani whose name is derived from the Swahili word ‘kupumua’ – meaning the place where mothers finally breathe with relief – is today a far cry from this beautiful meaning.
Founded in 1926 by a charitable organisation and handed over to the city fathers in 1944, the hospital today is a shell of its former glory.
It is not quite clear why no one will sort out this mess. At some point when the hospital started being scandal-ridden, the City Council appointed the Pumwani Maternity Management Board, and for a couple of years, it looked like the hospital was on its way out of the woods.
Today, the hospital is a mammoth of chaos, having grown from its original 26-bed facility when it was first created to about 350. How does Kenya hope to have a next generation when maternal health and safety are not guaranteed?
There are many useful projects that aim to make the act of delivery worthwhile for both mother and child, but watching our largest maternity hospital go to the dogs is inexplicable.
Further, the nursing staff won’t or can’t work despite being on a salary, and will not let others work, claiming they’re not qualified. Something deeply rotten is going on here.
Kenya is creating, or maybe has already created, a Homer G. Phillip Hospital situation as the city fathers sit pretty, watch and point fingers here and there including in the direction of the city mortuary, a facility they too run.
The Homer G. Phillip hospital is a facility is St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States that was shut down in 1979. It was named after Homer G. Phillip a black (African-American) lawyer who led the campaign to have a maternity facility for black women at that terrible time in the history of the US.
CHILD TRAFFICKING NOT NEW
The facility, though bought through a capital and lobby campaign by the black community, was run by the council of St. Louis. This hospital became the only maternity facility for black women in the United States, when the country was following a segregated system of governance similar to Apartheid in South Africa.
The hospital operated from 1937 to 1955, when segregation in health care was abolished in the US. One can only imagine the relief of black women back in those days, when the US was not the land of the free, to have a place of ‘safe’ maternity.
It is now emerging 50 years later that some of the hospital staff may have used the facility as a point of child trafficking, where they stole babies and sold them for profit. Kenyan nurses at Pumwani should therefore stop their self-righteous claims that such a possibility does not exist.
It is rare that human beings invent any new innovation or evil; it has all been done before. At Homer, staff took advantage of poor black women to steal their babies and lied to them that their new-borns had died.
The truth came out accidentally when the children of one Melanie Gilmore, who had been pronounced a ‘dead newborn’ at birth, decided to surprise their mother, who they knew was adopted, by looking for their grandmother.
INCLUDE BIRTH SUPPORT
In these days of technology and social media, they found their grandmother who was pleasantly surprised to realise that her ‘dead’ daughter was alive and well. Now it turns out that many black women (18 so far) are claiming the same experience at the Homer hospital.
Apparently the hospital ‘stole newborns of color for marketing in private adoption transactions’ according to the lawyer who is handling this shocking matter in the United States.
Kenya’s Jacinta Wanjiku may be our Melanie Gilmore, and her cry of distress may represent many mothers out there; after all, this is not the first time that allegations of infant trafficking have emerged from Pumwani.
The worst thing about the Kenyan case is that this is an age when the maternity experience now accommodates a doula, a birth support system partner. This can be a sister, mother, friend or even husband who goes through the entire maternity experience with an expectant woman.
It might be that this practice is now commonplace the world over to save more women from the Homer hospital experience.
Kenyan mothers must ensure they have a doula, and Pumwani hospital must create systems that allow a woman in labour to have a doula. Even the poorest in this society must be guaranteed safe maternity.
Ms Thangwa works in the heritage sector, specialising in culture and enterprise. Twitter: @muthonithangwa
