A doctor gives a pregnant woman an ultrasound scan.
Thirty two-year-old Wang Ping lay asleep on her bed in Shangdi Hospital’s surgery in Haidian district at 11 pm last Sunday. She did not know that her baby had died n her body 40 hours before, deprived of the chance to oversee the world.
Wang and her husband, who come from Henan Province, make a living by selling vegetables in an agricultural produce market. Wang’s pregnncy after her last miscarriage accidental abortion brought a happy surprise to the couple. But anxiety over the cost of giving birth in Beijing’s large hospitals grew as the baby did. The husband decided to take his wife to a private birth center nearby. It claimed to charge only 300 yuan (around US$37.5) for the birth of a boy and 200 yuan (around US$25) for a girl.
Wang lay on the bed of the clinic and, at noon on March 31, went into labor under the directions of a midwife, a middle-aged woman from Jiangxi province. Wang’s rdeal continued until two o’clock in the morning on April 1. She had still not given birth.The husband tried to transfer his wife to a hospital, but the midwife said no and claimed that everything was OK. The couple endured three more hours. Wang began to suffer from serious bleeding.
At 5 am the worried husband finally decided to send his bleeding wife to Shangdi hospital, a semi-private share hospital in Beijing, after two taxi drivers refused to take them.
Wang was in a very bad state. The doctor opened her stomach and found it was a mess inside. The baby boy, who weighed three kilograms, had stopped breathing, a nurse on duty said.
