One woman waited one-and-a-half hours at the hospital, only to see a nurse who yelled that she was “lying about being in labor.”
Three hours later, her baby was stillborn. Another woman gave birth on the street, steps away from a clinic that twice turned her away, saying her time had not come.
South Africa’s maternal mortality rate has quadrupled, while most African countries have improved theirs, according to a scathing report released on Monday by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The report says some of the increase — to more than 4,500 maternal deaths a year — could be the result of better reporting and a massive HIV/AIDS rate that has 18 percent of South Africans infected, about 5.7 million people. However, the group says the health indicator also has worsened because of a lack of accountability, corruption and poor healthcare.
For example, at least three South African hospitals are being investigated for baby deaths, including one where 29 babies died within a few weeks in January, apparently from a superbug. The hospital had no gloves, disinfectant spray, soap or toilet paper.
Several other women recalled nurses telling them to “shut up” during labor, saying they had enjoyed the sex that made them pregnant so they should not complain about labor pains.
“All South Africa’s good intentions, policies and strategies on paper won’t save women’s lives without strong accountability systems to make sure policies are carried out,” said Agnes Odhiambo, the chief researcher for the HRW project.
South Africa spends the most on health per citizen in sub-Saharan Africa at US$748 a year, and it has infrastructure and expertise unrivaled on the continent. Maternity care is free, abortion is legal, and there is a system of confidential inquiries to assess levels and causes of maternal deaths.
Almost 87 percent of women give birth in hospitals or clinics, though several women told HRW they were avoiding government facilities because of widespread stories of ill-treatment.
Yet between 1998 and 2007, the maternal mortality rate jumped from 150 to 625 deaths for each 100,000 live births.
That means South Africa, sub-Saharan African’s economic powerhouse, has no hope of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals that require 38 deaths per 100,000 births by 2015.
South African Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters he agreed with some findings in the report and that officials are “painfully aware” of the problems. However, he added that he has been working for more than two years to lower maternal deaths.
HRW interviewed 157 women, many nurses and community caregivers, as well as health officials between August last year and April this year. Researchers visited 16 health facilities, all in Eastern Cape Province, though the report emphasizes that officials acknowledge the problems are nationwide.
The report quotes witnesses saying HIV-positive women are denied care or given it too late. It quoted the mother of one such woman who went to a community health center where the nurse said the baby was dead and called for an ambulance to take her to a hospital.
They did not treat the woman while she waited for an hour, bleeding. As she walked to the ambulance, the stillborn baby came out.
“The ambulance people did not assist her. She got into the ambulance with the baby stuck in her trousers and she was still bleeding. She stayed that way for many hours at Dora Nginza, with the dead baby, without help,” the mother says in the report.
A week after delivering the stillborn baby, the daughter was still ill. A doctor ordered blood tests and X-rays and told a nurse she was in critical condition. They waited six hours for a nurse who took her blood pressure and left. Shortly after, she died.
Like most victims, her mother did not complain.
The report does not identify interviewees by name, for fear of repercussions. However, one victim, Ethiopian Ruta Araya, agreed to speak about the abuse she suffered when she was admitted to Dora Nginza Hospital in 2008, seven months’ pregnant with high blood pressure.
She said nurses “swore at me and insulted me,” telling her to go back to her own country — an attitude reflecting xenophobia in South Africa.
A doctor who ordered a scan told her “he couldn’t see anything, that I wasn’t even pregnant.”
She appealed to a doctor from Ghana: “I begged him: ‘Please, this doctor doesn’t want to help me, they don’t want to take the baby out, the baby’s dying in my tummy.’”
The Ghanaian persuaded her doctor to operate. Fifteen days after her admission, Araya gave birth to a 1kg baby girl. Even in the operating room, the doctors joked that her baby would be so small they would put it in a shoe box.
Nurses refused to change her bandages from a Caesarean section unless she paid bribes, causing the wound to turn septic and painful.
“I’m 28 years old, but I feel like a 50-year-old woman. I can’t even pick up my own baby ... I don’t know when I will feel young again,” she said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the