Port-au-Prince, Haiti.- Amid the socioeconomic and political crisis, pregnant women have now a new inconvenience, because Doctors without Borders (MSF) closed its mother-child hospital, so the project will be gradually dismantled in Haiti.

The institution was inaugurated in 2011, a year after the earthquake that killed some 300,000 people and displaced 500,000, in order to assist pregnant women suffering from complications like preeclampsia, eclampsia, obstetric hemorrhages and other problems.

‘Knowing that the situation in Haiti is still difficult, we had to make a very hard decision,’ said Michelle Chouinard, head of the MSF mission.

In some 176 beds, the Obstetrics Emergency Referral Center, located in the neighborhood of Delmas, in this capital, attended to nearly 500 patients a month.

In 2017 alone, 4,580 children were born at the hospital, fewer than in the previous year, when 5,594 children were delivered at the institution, including 2,176 by Cesarean section.

Last year, the hospital provided intensive care to 2,500 children and 1,900 Cesarean sections were performed.

According to Chouinard, the hospital was created as a five-year project to provide gyneco-obstetric emergency services, after the earthquake that affected most of Port-au-Prince’s infrastructure.

In 2016, it was decided to extend the services for another two years, due to the high rate of pregnancies and the precarious situation in the country.