Carmela Torres was 18 when she became pregnant for the first time. It was 1987 and she and her now-husband, Pablo Hernandez, were two idealistic young Colombians born in the coastal region of Montería who moved to the capital, Bogotá, in search of freedom and a better life. When Torres told her father she was expecting, so angered was he by the thought of his daughter having a child out of wedlock that they didn’t speak to each other for years.
Torres remained undaunted. Her pregnancy was trouble-free and she had a new life in Bogotá to get on with. But one December afternoon, suddenly, out of nowhere, her body began to convulse with sharp contractions. It was more than two months before her due date. She called Hernandez and together they rushed to the Instituto Materno Infantil (Mother and Child Hospital) in eastern Bogotá. Not long after arriving she gave birth naturally to a baby boy weighing just 1,650 grams (3 pounds, 10 ounces).
Before she had a chance to hold him, her baby was whisked off to a neonatal intensive-care unit. Torres was simply told to get dressed and go home. “I didn’t even get to touch him,” she says. “They said I could come back and see him but the visiting times were very restricted—just a couple of hours a day. When I did visit I was allowed to look but not touch.”
[For more of this story, written by Lena Corner, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/he...angaroo-care/515844/]
Comments (0)