Haitian women are already outnumbering Dominicans in maternity wards in northwestern Dominicans, a region where immigrants are welcomed and also a destination for women crossing the border to give birth in increasingly overcrowded hospitals.
In the public hospital in Guayubín, a small town surrounded by banana and rice farms located 42 kilometers east of the Masacre River, the natural border between the two countries, nine out of ten working women are Haitians, the largest proportion in the entire Dominican Republic.
SATURATED HOSPITALS
The women are in a small hospital that welcomes them regardless of their origin, but is overloaded, understaffed and destitute.
The operating room and laboratory are poorly equipped, the incubator is broken and there is no blood bank, which makes it impossible to transfuse.
The director of the hospital, Maira Rodríguez, explains that the budget is calculated according to the local population, without taking into account the number of undocumented immigrants living in the area and the number of mothers who venture to cross the border full time, so the money is not enough.
The doctor assures that, despite the difficulties, a patient “never returns”, unless he suffers medical complications and has to send them to a better equipped hospital, such as the one in Mao, the reference maternity hospital for the whole region.
MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS
“90 to 95% of complications are in foreign patients,” says Dr. Juan de la Cruz Rodríguez Pérez, director of the maternal and child hospital José Francisco Peña Gómez de Mao.
Most newly arrived Haitian women, she explains, tend to have anemia or other medical conditions that have not been treated before.
Many of those who live in the Dominican Republic have more than one doctor, either because of distrust or because they do not spend money, they are reluctant to follow the treatments that diagnose them.
The result is a very high rate of complications during birth and, as a corollary, a high mortality.
“What’s worse, in the Dominican Republic, maternal mortality is very high. And 47% of all maternal maternity corresponds to Haitian citizens,” the director of the National Health System (SNS), Mario Lama, explained to Efe.
WORK TRIP IN TEN YEARS
The number of Haitian women in work has tripled in ten years, reaching 30,322 births in 2020, which represents 27% of births in the country as a whole and means that between 10% and 14% of the entire hospital budget in the country is dedicated to foreign women. , according to SNS calculations.
Haitian births exceed 50% throughout the border area and also in La Altagracia (east), a province that is receiving increasing immigration, mainly due to the construction of new hotels in Punta Cana.
To calm the spirits of the most nationalist sectors, President Luis Abinader announced an agreement with Haiti two weeks ago to help the poor neighboring country build hospitals and stop the movement of women working across the border.
At least 4,073 pregnant Haitians entered the Dominican Republic in 2020, despite the fact that the border was officially closed for nine months due to the pandemic, according to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
A MORE COMPLEX PROBLEM
However, doctors at border hospitals confirm that most of the working women they receive are residents of the Dominican Republic.
“Almost 70% live here and 30% come to take what they call the bed, give birth here and take the paper to declare the baby,” says Dr. Domingo Guzmán Abreu, chief obstetrician at Guayubín Hospital.
Jandrine Bernabé, 22, is one of them. With a second newborn in her arms, she says she has lived “for many years” in the Dominican Republic, although she has never obtained a residence permit.
He says that because he has no papers, “at one point” he had problems receiving medical care; “But it’s not that difficult,” he added.
All the Haitian women who agreed to talk to Efe at Guayubín and Mao hospitals said they lived in the Dominican Republic, but not all wanted to tell their story.