14 DAY TRIAL // The head of a clinic in Mexico has been suspended when a woman was forced to give birth in front of the medical facility.
According to the Daily Mail, 29-year-old Irma Lopez was told that she was only eight months pregnant, therefore could not be in labor.
Lopez is a minority, of Mazatec ethnicity. She believes that racism and a disdain for the impoverished are the only reasons why she has been turned away.
She ended up delivering her son on the lawn, and a photo of the difficult moment went viral in Mexico.
“I am naming him Salvador. [...] He really saved himself,” she says, as the name means “savior.”
She was accompanied by her husband, who tried to reason with the nurses to have her hospitalized. At the time of the birth, she had no assistance and took no pills to ease the pain.
“I didn't want to deliver like this. It was so ugly and with so much pain,” she recalls.
According to Latin Times, the couple do not speak Spanish. The woman's husband, Pacheco López, shared the photo of her birth on Facebook.
“After waiting and demanding attention for two hours, she gave birth in the yard of the hospital after being ignored by personnel under the direction of the supposed doctor Adrian René Cruz Cabrera,” he writes.
Cabrera is suspended and the clinic in the village of San Felipe Jalapa de Diaz is currently under investigation.
“[We are conducting] an impartial and in-depth investigation into the medical personnel at the Jalapa de Díaz Health Center in order to delineate responsibilities with respect to the possible medical negligence in attention to Mrs. Irma López Aurelio, who gave birth to a child this Wednesday,” a statement by a government official reads.
“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,” Oaxaca official Mayra Morales adds.