Modern health care has plenty of problems, and, alas, as this local news report demonstrates, not listening to laboring mothers is very much one of them:
Breathing through her contractions, Mercedes Wells was wheeled out of Franciscan Health Crown Point Hospital in Indiana on Sunday.
Her family said the hospital staff had just discharged the mother of multiple children, telling her to go home and wait for her labor to progress.
Now, this is actually somewhat standard protocol. Hospital beds are expensive and scarce. They don't really want to give hospital rooms over to laboring mothers who may have another 10, 12, 16 hours of labor to go before they actually give birth. They have to prioritize as best they can, so they'll often say, "Go home and come back when it picks up."
The problem was, labor already had picked up — and they apparently just ignored it!
Mercedes begged [the nurse]. She begged her ... She said, 'I'm really in active labor. I can feel it, contractions as I walk. I mean my pain. I'm telling you; I can feel it.' And [the nurse] just ignored her.
This is all-too-familiar: Doctors regularly just ignore birthing moms and dip out.
It's a sore point of U.S. maternity care. And in this case it really came back to bite the hospital hard. The hospital discharged Mrs. Wells after which she allegedly delivered her baby less than 10 minutes after leaving:
Eight minutes into their drive, Leon and Mercedes' daughter was born on the side of the road, delivered by her father.
"He grabbed, like, a blanket, and then, put the baby on Mercedes' chest, my niece on her chest, and drove the rest of the way to [another] hospital..."
I'd love to see the hospital staff when they heard about that!
Footage circulating on social media shows Wells holding her baby just after the birth:
The hospital said the incident was "deeply troubling" and that it was conducting a "thorough investigation into this alleged incident."
Probably a good idea to just admit the laboring mother next time!
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