Midwife Yolande Maritz Fouchee, facing 14 charges in the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) – including one of culpable homicide – and accused of causing infants to either die or be born disabled while she was in charge of delivering them, has denied any wrongdoing.
In her pleas, Fouchee (48), now a deregistered nurse, said she did everything by the book when she delivered the babies.
But on Tuesday, one of the mothers, Carien Möller, testified that it was Fouchee’s fault that her daughter had been born with cerebral palsy in July 2019.
However, reports The Star, Fouchee claimed the child, Sophia, was born this way because Möller had a bladder infection while she was pregnant and refused to take antibiotics to clear it up.
The court was told that baby Sophia was blue in the face when she was born and that she had to be resuscitated for about 20 minutes before she could breathe normally.
The 14 charges against Fouchee include nine charges of assault on four mothers and their babies. It is claimed that she gave the mothers Cytotec and Oxytocin before delivering the babies, allegedly to hasten the birthing process. They were allegedly told that it was a Rescue Remedy.
The court heard that Fouchee handled between 16 and 24 deliveries a month at her You&Me delivery centre in Pretoria East, for which she charged from R16 000 upwards per delivery.
One of the charges Fouchee faces is that she called her daughter in to assist her with the deliveries. Her daughter, the prosecution said, does not hold any medical qualifications.
The culpable homicide charge against Fouchee follows the death of a baby born in 2020, who had died within minutes of her birth.
Another charge relates to a baby boy born with cerebral palsy and visual impairment. It is claimed that Fouchee was unable to deliver the baby and refused to transport the mother to hospital so that she could give birth via an emergency C-section.
It is also claimed that Fouchee, instead, used forceps in an attempt to deliver the infant, despite the pleas of the mother that she wanted to go to hospital instead. It is alleged that her actions during labour resulted in oxygen deprivation to the foetus, causing injury to the brain.
The baby was born blue and unresponsive, and the prosecution claimed that it cannot be ruled out that the baby’s bleeding on the brain was caused by the forceps.
The mothers are all due to testify in the trial, with Möller, the first to take the stand, saying she had seen Fouchee’s credentials on Facebook and been impressed.
As she had delivered her first child via C-section, she wanted a natural, water birth for her second child. A doula who assisted Möller in her delivery told the court that Fouchee had a “we call the baby protocol” in place, meaning that she (Fouchee) usually decided when a baby should be born. She then had “methods at hand in which to enhance the births”, the court was told.
Forceful delivery
Earlier this week, Aliki Loggenberg, a doula (birthing assistant) hired by the mother of a child born with cerebral palsy in 2019 at the birthing centre, testified that Fouchee’s practices were forceful that day.
Loggenberg, who had used the services of Fouchee for two of her children’s births, and had been present for other births conducted by the midwife, said that during the late stages of the mother’s contractions, Fouchee had constantly been doing “internal examinations” by sticking her hand in the mother’s vagina, despite her objections.
“I think she tried to forcibly stretch the cervix over the baby’s head to make (the birth) even quicker,” she testified.
After the birth, she told the court, she had never seen a baby born “as blue as she was”, reports News24.
Loggenberg said Fouchee, who has been operating her centre since 2009, was a popular choice as a midwife due to the shorter labour she allegedly promised expectant mothers, but in this case, more force than was necessary was shown.
She claimed that when she was giving birth to her last child, she was also given continuous internal examinations, which she felt were unnecessary, and painful.
She did not possess any medical qualifications, and as a doula, she was hired specifically to support mothers during the birthing process
Positions
Loggenberg testified that initially, when her contractions started, the mother was lying on her back in the birthing bath – but that Fouchee was using unusual force in changing her positions.
She disputed that Fouchee was attempting to assist the mother, saying it was odd to see her forcibly moving someone and that it gave her the sense that something was not right.
“She asked the mom to turn around on her hands and knees, and when the mother said, ‘I can’t, it’s too painful’, Fouchee took her with her own hands and moved her around. I sensed an urgency for the child to be born,” she told the court.
Advocate Nico Raubenheimer for Fouchee said that his client’s priority was the “safe birth of the baby”.
The trial is proceeding before Judge Papi Mosopa, who is sitting on the bench with an assessor, who is a medical doctor, to assist him.
The Star PressReader article – Court told midwife accused of baby deaths and disabilities (Open access)
https://thestar.pressreader.com/article/282076282780076
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