The first part of the S. (prefers to preserve his identity) became the first conviction for obstetric violence in Spain for an induced infant “without apparent justification”. It happened 14 years ago and in 2020 the UN judgment came, but this Galician woman still continues to litigate for the Spanish justice system to recognize her case and compensate her. She claims that she was induced into labor for no reason, that she was mistreated and that she was given a blank birth report. Now the Prosecutor’s Office, with the opinion of the UN not applied, has brought the case before the Supreme Court.
In September 2009, S., a judicial officer, went to the public hospital in Lugo, where she was born and where she lived before moving to Vigo. At 39 weeks and 6 days pregnant, she went there to “receive guidance” because she was having irregular contractions. But she was not in labor, says the UN opinion. Nevertheless, the doctor decided to induce labor.
“She was subjected to numerous interventions for which she received no explanation” in an induced birth without “apparent justification”, details the condemnatory opinion of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Nor was she asked for consent “on the procedures to which she was subjected”.
A “very instrumentalised” birth in which her husband could not be there. “The treatment was distant and authoritarian”, laments this Galician. He was injected with “synthetic oxytocin” without consultation. And this caused him, he explains, that the contradictions were more “painful and non-stop because it is something artificial”. He was also given intravenous Valium, although he had no record of this until he saw it in the medical report, which he requested through the courts after the hospital gave him a blank sheet in his first request. He remembers that in a conversation with the anesthetist he heard “don’t say anything to this one, she’s stunned”. It was much later, when he read the word Valium, that the comment made sense.
She claims that she was subjected to a dozen vaginal touches and that the baby ended in an episiotomy of which she was not informed. A birth in which they did not allow her husband to attend. And she complains that they removed her placenta “by putting their hand in and destroying the walls of the endometrium”. These actions are not common and can only happen in cases where there is no spontaneous expulsion or some urgency that must be dealt with, experts in the field explain to this medium.
After the traumatic birth, S. was hospitalized for another week. Also his newborn daughter, but they could not be together for more than “two and a half hours a day”. The oxytocin made the mother sick and she kept vomiting. And the newborn was hospitalized for a fever that S. attributes to the multiple vaginal touches to which she was subjected and which she claims she proved at trial. This made breastfeeding difficult.
The sum of all these situations produced post-traumatic stress in S. and she needed psychological help, in addition to physiotherapy for the episiotomy. Two years of physical and mental recovery, “complications” and many problems. And still in this process, he started a judicial journey that fourteen years later is still going on and which began by having to claim the birth report in court.
Together with Francisca Fernández Guillén, her lawyer and who has also been the jurist who has obtained the other two convictions for obstetric violence in Spain, they presented a lawsuit that was dismissed and also an appeal for constitutional protection. They exhausted all avenues until they decided to take the case to the UN, in which CEDAW ruled in favor in February 2020. But “Spain has no intention of complying with either this or the other two resolutions”, laments Fernández Guillén. The lawyer explains that the Xunta de Galicia has got “in the way” in this matter and that the Spanish State claims, in order not to comply with the opinion, that “its courts and tribunals are sovereign”. But Fernández Guillén, who raised the demand to the UN with the help of a group of lawyers, remembers that if you sign an international treaty “you have to accept and correct what this body says”.
Now the prosecutor of the National Court supports the resolution and says that “the treaties are to be fulfilled and the requests for compensation must be attended to”, the lawyer points out. If the Supreme Court’s opinion is favorable, it would not be a victory solely for S., but “it would be a great benchmark for the fight against discrimination against women”, he says.
