In Senegal, the death of a pregnant woman in hospital causes an outcry

Published on: 04/13/2022 – 12:07 A young woman in her thirties, nine months pregnant, died on April 7 after unsuccessfully requesting a caesarean section in a public hospital in the city of Louga, in northern Senegal. The case has caused great emotion in the country where the population denounces the lack of resources in the health sector. The death of a pregnant woman in hospital, after what the local press described as “long agony and denial of care”, aroused considerable emotion in Senegal, prompting the Head of State to react and to promise “all the light” on this drama. The facts go back several days and occurred in a public hospital in the city of Louga, in the north of the country. According to the Senegalese press, the young woman, aged about 30, married and nine months pregnant, died there on April 7 after having unsuccessfully requested a caesarean section. The staff of the establishment would have refused her request, arguing that her operation was not planned, and threatened to expel her if she insisted. “Unacceptable” headlined the Senegalese newspaper Liberation on Monday. According to the media, the young woman waited for twenty hours for an intervention that never came, before expiring while pronouncing words widely relayed Monday and Tuesday on social networks: “Operate on me because I don’t know not if I’ll still be here tomorrow.” Her baby was not saved. The director of the hospital, Amadou Guèye Diouf, declared on Monday evening that he had “initiated an administrative procedure to elucidate the contours of this case. […] and take the appropriate action”. The case still nourished several headlines in the written and online press on Tuesday. Saying to have learned of this event “with the greatest sadness, President Macky Sall published Monday evening a message of “heartfelt condolences to his family” on the Snapchat social network, which is very popular among Senegalese women. To shed “full light” on this tragedy “I have instructed the competent authorities to shed full light on the causes of death in order to locate all the responsibilities No failure will be tolerated,” added the Head of State, ensuring that he had the health sector “at heart” and insisted “every day on improving the care of the populations”. Health claims to have sent missions to Louga hospital to “know the circumstances of the death” of the pregnant woman and “to situate the responsibilities and take the appropriate measures”, in a press release Tuesday evening. Country with a Muslim majority, Séné gal has made significant progress in the field of women’s rights in recent years, as evidenced by the adoption at the beginning of April of a “law on the protection of women in a state of pregnancy”, supposed in particular to put an end to the widespread practice consisting in dismissing an employee as soon as she is pregnant. But the UN and rights defenders regularly call on the authorities to do more to put an end to the discrimination, in particular legal, from which women suffer, as well as the violence from which they are commonly the subject. Serial controversies in hospitals The Louga tragedy is the latest in a series of tragedies that have occurred in Senegal in the health sector, where the unions regularly deplore a lack of human, technical and financiers. Some have already hit the headlines, such as the death of four newborns in April 2021 following a fire at the hospital in the town of Linguère, near Louga. On social networks, many p messages denounce the treatment reserved for patients in public structures and in particular the delays that lead many patients to turn to private sector services, despite the higher cost. “We can’t continue to hold God accountable for our actions,” one woman wrote on Twitter. Another deplores: “What hurts the most is when we Senegalese pretend to discover, terrified, what is happening in this country. Today, it is the hospital. Tomorrow, [ce sera] other [chose]. We will forget and we will move on to the next controversy. The daily is dramatic in that it trivializes everything. The victim filed a complaint ca Monday with the local court.With AFP