A Chinese woman who suddenly found herself painfully in labor after 40 weeks of an otherwise uneventful pregnancy hurried with her husband to a hospital in the city of Nanchong, Sichuan Province in the morning of Feb. 5.
After a short stop in the the lobby, the woman’s husband rushed up to the gynecology and obstetrics department of the Nanchong Jialing No. 6 People’s Hospital to alert staff about his wife’s urgent condition.
Rather than arrange for doctors to help with the delivery, the nurse present at the department turned the couple down on the grounds that the hospital’s computer system was in the process of updating and that it would be impossible to register the birth or the mother’s hospitalization.
Under China’s strict family planning regime, every birth must be registered. Recently, couples were allowed to have a second child, but the documentation requirements continued.
The man, who called himself Chai Jun, according to the local Chinese publication West Metropolis Daily, became anxious and begged the nurse to have doctors help his wife deliver first before working out the bureaucratic formalities. The nurse refused and told him to take his wife to a different hospital.
