Baby trafficking

It is time for hospitals to regulate their spaces and require validation of identity at the primary points of entry.

An infant that was abducted at Ayub Medical Complex (AMC) has fortunately been recovered and returned to its rightful parents. The baby was born on May 4 and stolen on May 5 by a couple posing as hospital staff and claiming they had come to take the infant for vaccination. The mother willingly handed over her baby suspecting nothing. It was handed to a woman called Lubna who is still at large and she then sold it for Rs60,000 to a couple. The police have now arrested a ward orderly at AMC for complicity in the crime.

This is not the first child abduction at a hospital nor will it be the last, and questions abound. Infants and older children are abducted and trafficked on an almost daily basis but rarely make headline news. Some are recovered but many are not, leaving their parents distraught at the loss of their child. Security is lax at most hospitals and it is not difficult for anybody to don a white coat, hang a stethoscope around their neck and walk in unchallenged. Maternity and gynaecological wards are always busy places with people coming and going. Nobody knows who anybody else is in the absence of a formal system of wearing badges and identities are not checked either at the primary entrance to the hospital or anywhere else inside it. Let this incident act as the wake-up call for hospital management teams across the country. We are at our most vulnerable in a hospital, our lives literally in the hands of others very often and we have to trust hospitals to provide an appropriate duty of care — not just for our physical bodies but for the physical space that is the hospital itself. It is time for hospitals everywhere to regulate their spaces and require validation of identity at the primary points of entry. This will not eradicate the stealing of babies completely, but it may deter, at least, opportunist theft.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2014.

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