Nagpur: A WCL employee from Saoner has alleged that his wife delivered a stillborn child due to the negligence of doctors at Orange City Hospital. The doctors however explained that the baby died before delivery in the womb itself, when they had not administered any medicines.
WCL employee Sahebrao Mahalle admitted his wife Kavita to the hospital on March 22, as the delivery date was given as March 24. “We followed all procedures, from diagnosis to check-ups. Everything was said to be OK. We were elated because my wife was pregnant after 12 years. However, a day before the operation, we were told the baby had died inside the womb,” he said, asking how could this happen if all reports were normal. “When I asked Dr Kuldeep Sachdev the reason of death, he said, ‘I don’t know’,” alleged Mahalle, who raised the issue through a press conference on Friday.
The post mortem requested by Mahalle, who has filed a police complaint, stated the cause as ‘unexpected intra-uterine death’, which means death inside the uterus.
Orange City Hospital director Dr Anup Marar said he sympathized with the family, but the hospital was not responsible for death occurring in the uterus of the mother. “Before operation, a baby is in the natural custody of the mother. We had not administered any medication. When we noticed that the fetal heart sounds had stopped, and the child was a girl, the hospital called the police, since we were sceptical of what the mother may have eaten. The hospital would have been responsible if the death had been extra-uterine, that is when the baby was taken out of the uterus.”
Marar said that advanced blood tests indicate it was a condition of ante-natal death syndrome, whose cause is not known, and has no literature in India. In the US, he said, this condition occurs one in 167 child births. “It was an eye-opener for us as well. The parents should know that doctors are not Gods, and can’t guarantee a 100 per cent successful child birth,” he said.