Birth on Lawn Picture Provokes Outrage After Woman Denied Clinic Entry (Warning: Graphic Photo)
A woman who was forced to deliver her child on the front lawn of a rural clinic after she was denied entry has provoked outraged in a country where discrimination and access to health care affect numerous women.
Irma Lopez and her husband walked more than an hour to the Rural Health Centre in the village of San Felipe Jalapa de Diaz in Oaxaca, Mexico to seek help because she was nearly nine months pregnant, but were turned away by the clinic staff for reasons not yet clear.
While she was outside the clinic a short while later her water broke and she gave birth to a son by herself as her husband tried to get a nurse to help. She was eventually taken in by the clinic after giving birth and discharged the same day with prescriptions for medicine and products.
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A photograph of her giving birth with her newborn lying on the grass with the umbilical cord still attached made the front page of several Mexican newspapers, including the front cover of La Razon de Mexico, while also being shared widely on the internet.
Lopez, who is of Mazatec ethnicity, and her husband live in a one-bedroom hut in the mountains of northern Oaxaca. The incident has ignited a debate regarding the discrimination faced by the country's indigenous people as well as the inefficiencies of its health care system.
"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," Mayra Morales, Oaxaca's representative for the national Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, told La Razon.
Authorities in the southern Mexican state have now suspended the health center's director, Dr. Adrian Cruz, and launched an investigation into the incident, which occurred on Oct. 2.
"I am naming him Salvador," said Lopez, which means savior in English. "He really saved himself. I didn't want to deliver like this. It was so ugly and with so much pain," The 29-year-old said.
