– hospital says parents can uplift it for burial
The body of Shellon Nedd’s stillborn baby is still at the Georgetown Public Hospital mortuary and the parents are free to uplift it during working hours, the hospital said in a press statement yesterday.
In an effort to address the “misunderstanding” surrounding the whereabouts of the child’s body, the hospital said that usually parents would be reluctant to view babies in such conditions and the hospital would take responsibility for burial. This, the release stated, was the reason behind not allowing Nedd to see her child.
While the hospital’s administration said it regretted that the woman was not shown her child’s body earlier it was “saddened that she discussed the matter with the media first” and not the hospital’s administration.
The press release said that “had this been done, this matter could have already been amicably resolved”.
On Friday a distressed Nedd told Stabroek News that she was not shown the body of a stillborn baby girl she gave birth to at the hospital on July 8. However, according the press release, she gave birth to the baby on July 7.
Nedd, a mother of five, had said she was grieving for her child and wanted to see its remains. In her desperation, the woman had visited the Lyken’s Funeral Parlour after hearing that remains were usually taken there from the hospital morgue.
The woman explained that she was first told by a nurse that she had given birth to a baby girl and she would see her when she went to the ward. Later, she was told by another nurse that her baby “was a beautiful girl baby but it born with no brains and it dead”.
After being told by yet a third nurse, that she had given birth to a “mongoloid [a derogatory term used to refer to people with Down’s syndrome] and if my family see the baby dem will laugh,” Nedd said, “I ent care if my baby was a Mongoloid. If I give birth to a dog or cat or whatever I still want to see me baby. I carry she fuh nine months and I had pain to get she so I want to see the body”.