Casablanca: Woman Gives Birth in the Street after Expulsion from Hospital

Casablanca- Recently uploaded to Youtube, a new video has both shocked and outraged many Moroccans. In the video, a mother shares the moving story of how she gave birth to her baby in the street after she had been expelled from a hospital in Casablanca.

According to the woman speaking in the video, who is apparently the mother of the baby, she was kicked out of Mohammed Sekkat Hospital in Casablanca and subsequently give birth to her baby in a street in the Ain Chok neighborhood of Casablanca.

She says that she had gone to the said hospital in the morning. There, she had to wait three hours before someone from the labor and delivery service finally spoke to her. “You always seek what is for free,” the person told the mother. “I was insulted and humiliated there, and none of them minded my cries for help, knowing that I was in pain during the last hours of my pregnancy,” the mother shares in the video, her newborn in her arms.

The mother also explained that she was denied access to the labor and delivery services in the hospital because she could not afford the hospital charges since her husband is jobless. “I barely found a taxi who accepted take me and my mother-in-law home,” she explains in the video.

Unexpectedly, after the cab dropped them next to their home, the mother could not hold on any longer, and so had to give birth to her baby downstairs, before the entrance of her home, assisted by a neighbor who had never helped in a delivery process before, and surely never in such circumstances.

According to one of her neighbors, the hospital that had refused to offer its services to the mother is “full of corrupt people.” “It’s a shame that Moroccans still give birth in the street in the twentieth-first century,” said another neighbor. “This is a scandal. She sadly gave birth to her baby in the most lamentable ways, and the hospital is to be held accountable for that,” another neighbor said.

Edited by Melissa Smyth