Nelisiwe Manqele and her family want justice for her daughter and the grandchildren they will never have the chance to raise.
“My daughter started experiencing pain when she was at school on February 25. I picked her up from school and took her straight to Far East Rand Hospital,” she explained.
The fifteen-year-old girl, who will not be named, was 25 weeks pregnant with twins.
“As soon as we got to the hospital her water broke, so I knew that she was in active labour,” said Manqele.
She claims that her daughter was attended by a nurse first and then a doctor who informed them that the teenager would be taken to the theatre to deliver the twins.
“He said that I could go home and they would call me once they were done with the surgery. He warned us that the babies may not survive because of a low body weight,” she said.
Not long after she left, Manqele said she received a call from her daughter asking her to check for messages on a social media platform.
“I logged on and I saw photos of a baby. I was shocked and I asked my daughter what was going on. She told me that she had given birth, and she was alone, that is how she could take the photo. I asked her where the nurses were, but no one was with her,” she explained.
Her terror grew after her daughter sent an even bloodier photo of the second baby.
“At that point she told me that a nurse had taken the first baby, and left her alone to give birth to the second child,” said Manqele.
In the photo, a baby can be seen lying in a pool of blood, with the umbilical cord still attached.
“She was scared because she could not even move from the bed. She did not know what to do with the baby,” she added.
The mother of the children said she kept nudging the newborn to cry.
“It was the only way for me to know that the child was alive. But after a while, the baby stopped crying. I just knew that something was wrong,” she said.
The mother claims that a nurse finally came after she was called by another patient in the ward.
“She held my baby by the leg and said that it was obvious that the baby died. Then she took the baby away,” she added.
Manqele rushed to the hospital to see for herself what had happened. When she arrived she questioned why her daughter was left unattended while she was in labour.
