Woman survives death in fake city abortion

Kampala

She went into a Marie Stopes clinic in Kampala teeming with life as a house wife upbeat about family planning services. Three hours later, Ms Jackie Namataka, 27, had blacked out and was crying on a stretcher desperate for emergency medical intervention to save her life.

A clinical officer, who paraded himself as a doctor, had ruptured the woman’s uterus and perforated her intestines in an alleged botched ‘abortion’ on February 24, 2010. It’s a distressing story of a couple desirous of not bearing a kid in the next five years, reaching out to professionals for a scientific break, but drift into a death trap.

Only frantic telephone calls by the victim’s husband, Mr Mike Kizito Waburoko, a dash to two top city medical facilities and eventually a seven-hour marathon surgery saved Ms Namataka.

The ordeal
On the fateful day, a staff at Marie Stopes’ branch at the Makerere-Kavule ushered the clients in happily and booked them for consultation at Shs7,000.

One of the clinical officers at Marie Stopes (name withheld for legal reasons) and now reported to be on the run, when briefed about the couple’s desire not to have a baby for the next five years, first enquired about the pattern of the woman’s menstruation cycle.

Promising he would handle, the clinical officer who assumed the role of a doctor, declared that Ms Namataka who has a five-and-half-month-old baby, was pregnant and demanded Shs180,000 (Shs150, 000 was paid after bargain) to ‘clean’ her womb.

This was the beginning of Ms Namataka’s woes that have cast a cloud over professional care by some private health providers in the country.
“I doubted because a week earlier, we had done a pregnancy test and the results were negative…” Ms Namataka said, adding: “The man took me to a room to clean my womb. When he started his work, I felt too much pain and made a lot of noise.” “The man told me to stop wailing. You want police to come and arrest me here that I am raping you?” Then the mockery followed: “I always work on Makerere University girls and they don’t cry but a big woman like you is making noise!” “I asked him to first use pain killers but the man said ‘for us here we don’t do that’. It was later discovered that the man was actually damaging my intestines. He simply didn’t know what he was doing to my womb.”

“After seeing that I had bled a lot, the man walked out leaving me in severe pain. Another doctor was called in and found me helpless. I heard him asking his staff why he was not informed about my situation,” Ms Namataka told this newspaper.

She added: “I called my husband and told him: I am dying. When I went for a short call I was bleeding profusely and I was rushed to Kibuli Hospital. I was later transferred to Angel Medical Centre in Kamwokya where a life-saving seven-hour surgery was carried out by a group of specialised doctors.”

Medical documents seen by Sunday Monitor indicate that the clinical officer at Marie Stopes had ruptured Ms Namataka’s uterus and perforated a big portion of the intestines, making raw faecal matter leak into her other internal organs.

The woman’s sphincter muscle, too, was damaged. “Patient admitted with perforated uterus/gut, (sigmoid). Laparatomy done, repair of uterus done…” reads one of the medical documents in possession of this newspaper.

One of the doctors on the emergency team that carried out the surgery that saved Ms Namataka’s life but declined to be named for professional reasons told Sunday Monitor: “What that man did to the woman was terrorism, he wanted to kill her. There was totally no pregnancy ...”

Abortion is illegal in this country and convicts face up to 14 years in jail. According to an April 8, 2010 police medical examination report seen by Sunday Monitor, “the above injuries were fatal in absence of surgery.” It was further established that Marie Stopes later contributed Shs3 million as “payment for medical and surgical management of Jackie Namataka at Angel Medical Centre.”

When contacted, Marie Stopes director of operations Ketty Jarman declined to comment. However, Ms Christine Namayanja, the health provider’s acting national director, in an email to Sunday Monitor said: “Marie Stopes Uganda does not feel it is appropriate at present to comment on this case due to the present police investigation, with which we are fully cooperating.”