Going into labour is one of the most painful things that women endure, something that most men cannot even conceive. When the contraction pain starts, there is little comfort to be derived from your mum holding your hand, your husband nearby or the doctor briskly reassuring you.
Yet there are women who fare far worse. Women in public hospitals and primary health clinics in towns. Besides the most evident reasons like lack of bed space, doctors and medication, there is also the other aspect of violence and abuse. This is India’s other sexual violence, which hundreds of women face everyday across the country in dingy public hospitals.
Recently a Scroll.in reporter went undercover in a Kolkata Hospital to check if rumours of pregnant women being slapped are true. This is what she found and wrote.
“It has been a long, long haul for Munmun. This is the second (government) hospital she has been admitted to that day (for delivery of her child) and both have treated her with superb disdain, throwing her in wards bursting with women without beds, making her plead for water, dismissing her pain. Some of the women lying next to her in the ward of the Kolkata hospital said they had been slapped during delivery.”
By the time the doctors come to help her with her labour, any anaesthesia given to her is long gone and Munmun can feel the pain of every cut and stab. But she barely whimpers, biting her lip to quell any involuntary screams from the pain. She had already been told not to scream. The doctor later concedes that she was a good patient, “No drama, no screaming. You should see some of them, how they shriek.”
Munmum was lucky because she didn’t scream. Many others not only got slapped, but they even had nasty abuses hurled at them like, “Why don’t you open your legs now, you weren’t so shy when you got pregnant.”
Aariya Khan was rejected by maternity hospitals and gave birth at Bhayander Station
In 2013, The Atlantic reported of a story where a woman in Bihar, undergoing Caesarean in a PHC with inadequate local anaesthesia was repeatedly hit by the health worker because he found her moans annoying. And since Devi’s abdomen was cut open at that point, she had no choice but to weather the health worker’s blows.
Oddly enough, the Scroll story reports that this kind of abusive behaviour was only directed at women, only in gynaecology and obstetrics department. The other departments in the same hospital discouraged this kind of abuse. “Patients were slapped and abused all the time in the labour room. “Why are you screaming now, weren’t you screaming in pleasure when you were getting fucked?’ is a common refrain,” reports Scroll.
And that’s not all. In December 2014, Bloomberg reported of horror stories in Mirzapur District Women’s Hospital, after a woman died during labour. Patients there reported that they have to bribe the hospital staff to see their own newborns!
It’s shocking to think that educated medical personnel would behave in such cruel manner. Never mind Hippocratic Oath, there is not even a shred of humanity in this kind of behaviour.
Have health workers and doctors in public medical services become so immune after delivering countless babies that now screams of pain are sheer irritants to them? Is that why they do not think twice to slap these women? Or is this just another extension of gendered violence that has pervaded the Labour Ward too, amongst medical personnel?
At every step, these women embody the attacks that happen to Indian women on a daily basis, whether it be domestic violence at home, sexual violence on the streets, gang rapes, eve-teasing, molestation, forced marriages and basically a complete denial of the right to decide for their life. Violence in hospitals is now one more aspect that is added to the long list of gendered violence in India.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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