Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro ordered all women in the country to “get to birthing” and have six women each in remarks at a maternity event Tuesday.
Maduro’s remarks inspired shock and outrage given the context of Venezuela’s deadly, barely standing healthcare system, where giving birth is often a life-or-death situation given the near-total lack of basic medications, disinfectants in hospitals, and infant care. Maduro’s socialist policies and the universal healthcare system imposed by his predecessor, late dictator Hugo Chávez, have led to a complete collapse of medical infrastructure in the country. Thanks to lack of basic equipment such as hospital beds, reports have surfaced of women throughout Venezuela giving birth on the hospital floor, in the waiting room, or in public places like hours-long food ration lines.
When Chávez was diagnosed with cancer, he immediately left the country and traveled to Cuba for oncological care. As Cuba is also a communist country with a collapsed healthcare system. Chávez died shortly thereafter in 2013.
Maduro was attending an event promoting his regime’s “Humanized Childbirth” plan on Tuesday, allegedly intended to provide better prenatal care to Venezuelan women. The Maduro regime has not clarified in any way what the plan does to help women throughout pregnancy, though Maduro himself promised “childbirth without pain” while promoting the plan last month. State media claims the plan offers “support circles” for mothers to help them “take conscience of their bodies and the functioning of their organisms.”
The “Humanized Childbirth” plan was launched in tandem with a promotional campaign to bully mothers into breastfeeding rather than feeding formula, a propaganda campaign fueled by the United Nations and World Health Organization that has led to dire consequences in cases where mothers medically cannot produce enough milk.
On Tuesday, Maduro met with allegedly socialist mothers in Caracas, apparently to thank them for contributing to the nation with their children. As broadcast on state propaganda television, Maduro met a woman who was the mother of six children. He thanked her, then commanded all women to similarly procreate.
“Let’s get to birthing, let’s give birth, every woman give birth to six children, let’s grow the nation. [Turn on the] Music!” Maduro demanded.
Maduro later noted that it is currently Women’s History Week in Venezuela and urged men to care for their spouses.
“I want the people to hear me this week. It is the week of the woman, and I make a call to all men, to respect and love women, [love] towards the mother, towards the grandmother, towards the daughter, and towards the [female] comrade, towards the partner, towards the wife,” Maduro said. “A woman cannot be touched not even with the petal of a rose, absolute respect for women. No to gendered violence, an end to violence.”
Maduro’s forces have beaten, raped, and murdered hundreds of girls and women protesting against his socialist regime. Among the most famous victims was 22-year-old beauty queen Genesis Carmona, shot in the head during a protest against Maduro in 2014. Three years later, Wuilly Arteaga, a violinist made famous for playing the Venezuelan national anthem during protests, testified to being beaten and forced to watch members of Maduro’s National Guard rape a young woman in the back of a regime vehicle.
State media advertised the Maduro event Tuesday as, once again, helping “prepare the organism for childbirth without pain,” which is scientifically not possible, except in extremely rare cases. The term “painless childbirth” has its origins in Soviet research later imported to Europe by Fernand Lamaze, whose discoveries under the communist regime in the USSR form the backbone of much of obstetrics education offered to expecting parents in American hospitals today.
Infant mortality rates have skyrocketed in Venezuela since Maduro took power after Chávez’s death, though socialism was already damaging the quality of hospitals under Chávez. From 2015 to 2016, the number of newborns dying in hospitals rose from 94 to 166 in one hospital alone, Venezuela’s largest obstetrics hospital. At the time, workers in the hospital warned that it was operating at under 50 percent staffing capacity and without a functional emergency room. Baby deaths went up another 30 percent in 2017. Lack of staffing, lack of basic supplies and drugs, and especially a lack of hygienic supplies like industrial cleaners facilitated post-birth infections. In one particularly harrowing case in 2017, 17 children died in a maternity ward because an opossum infestation had resulted in the children dying of bacterial infections.
The situation for mothers has not been significantly better than for their newborns. Ample videos and photo evidence of women giving birth on the floor, in the dark, or not even being able to make it into a hospital that would accept them have surfaced nationwide. Maduro has responded by arresting medical staff exposing the horror. Venezuela stopped publishing maternal mortality rates in 2016.
“They do not offer service in time, there are no doctors, there’s nothing,” a Venezuelan mother-to-be said in a report published in 2009. “There are barely any doctors at all.”
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