I held her, we cried together, but why? This woman was not poor like some others, she was not malnourished, she did not have the sunken-in eyes and cheeks of the woman in the bed next to her. But, when she was mourning her dead baby, she cried out in English, as if her query was directed at me, “Why? Why?” She looked from my eyes to the eyelashes of her perfect baby girl. “I feel like I have malaria,” Sarah said. When Sarah, the young mother I attended, was deep into labor, she mumbled in Lugandan, her mother tongue from her early years. The other baby, born to the mother in Sally’s care, had been dead for a while: the skin was peeling and the placenta came out in fractions, only with manual separation. I looked at Sally but she (a young midwife, no older than me) said, “It’s okay, you have nothing to do.” So I received the stillborn baby into my hands. I had been hoping the fetal heart was just hiding behind the placenta, but now this pulse-less cord. Sally was tending to the other woman, the one who did not speak any common language, and we were not even sure of her name.Īt crowning, as the head was emerging, I reached for the umbilical cord it lay between my fingers like a cold wire with no pulse. I heard a definite swooshing of placenta pulse down low-much too low-in the abdomen. Sister Mary said, “We have heard no FHT, but we shall not cut because we do not know for sure and we shall not cut a woman for nothing.” She and the doctor went for rounds and Sally and I stayed with the two laboring mothers. That moment before it all happened, when the curtains between the beds in the labor ward were open and the two mothers stared into each others eyes, could they have seen then their shared fate?
And yet, here in Uganda, I have seen both in less than a week. In the five years since I began working in the birth field, first as a doula in Israel and then as a midwifery student in the US, I had not yet seen a dead baby or a dead mother. Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Midwifery Today, Issue 94, Summer 2010.
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