Last Monday, Mr. and Mrs. Valazquez from Buenos Aires went to the Juan Domingo Peron hospital to have their first baby. The baby was 22-weeks-old on the day of birth, and deeming the baby was small enough, doctors chose to deliver the baby naturally instead of the cesarean procedure.
After the baby’s body came out first, there was a spasm of the cervix, and the boy’s head got stuck. The obstetrician called another doctor who tried to free it with a maneuver, but there was a tear, and the baby got decapitated.
The head remained inside the mother and doctors planned to perform cesarean to remove the head, but the woman ejected it naturally, along with the placenta. In an interview with Argentina’s El Grito Salta website, Reina Natalia Valazquez blamed the doctor for the botched delivery.
“I asked for a cesarean but they said there was no-one around who could do it. But when the baby’s head was inside of me, they quickly found someone who could do it,” said Valazquez. “She was stretching and turning the baby’s body around. I felt that. They were doing it very hard. I, it was very painful.”
“I told the doctor she was hurting me, but she said, ‘No I’m not.’ She asked me to shut up and open my legs and kept stretching the baby until they took the baby out,” she continued. “But I could only see the bottom part, and they didn’t show me the whole baby. I only got to see the legs, and they said. ‘Let’s take her urgently to surgery.'”
The hospital’s director, Jose Fernandez, claims the medics decided against a cesarean because Ms. Valazquez was 11 CM dilated. The heartbroken couple took their baby home in a white box coffin.
An investigation is being launched into the baby’s death and an autopsy is getting carried out in his body. Although they have agreed to cooperate, the hospital will continue to operate until authorities prove negligence on their part.
“I’m asking for justice because this can happen to anyone,” said Valazquez. “And they should sack this woman, and remove her doctor title. She did this to me. She can’t work as a doctor. She is the one that decapitated my baby.”
This article was inspired by DAILY MAIL // ‘They told me that the baby’s head was inside of me’: Mother details how doctors tore her baby’s head from its body when the child became stuck as she gave birth in Argentina.