When healing hurts — how hospitals fail women in their darkest hours

“Everyone talks about waiting in the delivery room for hours, but nobody talks about waiting to have surgery while miscarrying.”

This sentiment, which frequently pops up on my TikTok feed, instantly pulls me back to 2013. I was lying on a gurney, awaiting a D&C after a traumatic miscarriage, parked right next to a mother eagerly waiting for her C-section. The contrast was cruel, unfair and profoundly isolating; I desperately craved the anaesthetic that would finally allow me to escape it all.

Unfortunately, for myself and countless other women, the clinical insensitivity didn’t end there. My journey through the healthcare system eventually included a tumour removal, a high-risk pregnancy, another miscarriage during Covid, and multiple laparoscopies for endometriosis.

Though privileged to access private hospitals, what haunts me long after the physical scars have healed is the emotional toll of being routinely placed in maternity wards. Waking up to the beep of foetal heart rate monitors and walking past portraits of smiling newborns, I was expected to just grit my teeth and bear it. As women, we are conditioned to quietly endure. But we shouldn’t have to.

In 2025, I conducted a study with 35 South African women on their experiences in private hospitals around the country. It became clear that the placement and mental health of women experiencing gynaecological procedures is severely neglected.

Based on their surgeries, which included emergency C-sections, tumour or tube removals, D&Cs due to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies, hysteroscopies and laparoscopies, only three women could choose a private room, while the majority were placed in maternity wards.

For 20 of the women, their conditions affected their fertility. The women described the heartbreak of “listening to newborn cries after just losing” a baby.

One participant shared that “loss and gain do not go hand in hand … putting a woman who lost her baby next to a new nursing mother is just cruel”.

Some of the women recalled asking to be moved or trying to express their anxiety and sadness to nursing staff, who seemed to give mothers with newborns more attention.

“Nurses are tending to mothers with babies. I wonder if I was ignored because I wasn’t with child,” said another woman.

The women indicated that rather than leaning on doctors or nurses for support, they drew strength from their husbands, God, family, themselves and friends; in that order. In fact, when expressing their needs, two of the women were told by nurses that the hospital was not their “home” or a “hotel”.

The call for the prioritisation of women’s mental health in hospitals through the separation of wards is gaining momentum. Louise Caldwell, who was “haunted by the labour ward”, and celebrations of birth while she was miscarrying, secured 28,000 signatures for her petition for separate facilities for bereaved mothers in Scotland. This has now been included in policy and supported by the National Health Service.

The anguish of being in a shared ward has been documented at the Miscarriage Leave conference in Malta, while a petition was also launched in Zimbabwe by CITE in 2022, but it garnered only 923 signatures.

This marginalisation of women’s mental health in hospitals is rooted in derogatory vocabulary such as “incompetent cervix”, “geriatric pregnancy” and “hostile uterus”, to name a few.

Emotional labour

The medicalisation of miscarriage compounds the emotional labour women must push through when in hospital. The study also revealed that aftercare or counselling was not offered after a traumatic surgery or loss to 29 of the women, while only six were referred to a counsellor. These included women diagnosed with postpartum depression and one who was a victim of GBV.

“Anxious”, “depressed”, “heartbreaking” and “suicidal” were words used by women in the study to articulate their emotional state while in hospital, yet only 11 women felt safe enough to express this to the nurse or doctor.

While five women were satisfied with their treatment in hospital, the majority indicated that doctors and nurses require training to care for women in these predicaments. Further, hospitals need to do more to create facilities for bereaved mothers, or those not admitted for childbirth, to ensure their environment is nurturing, rather than traumatic.

The study found that these women avoid being readmitted for fear of the psychological impact on their mental health, while some believe the main aim of private hospitals is profit, rather than recovery.

Perhaps, the placement of women in wards is due to the proximity of the doctor, the convenience of clustering patients or equipment in the ward. Visits and emails to two private hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal to enquire about this went unreciprocated, mirroring the insignificance attributed to women’s health.

Eventually, a former hospital manager shed light on the fact that skilled maternity nurses, response time to patients, and profit underlie the placement of patients.

However, the patient does have the agency to request a different ward. Whether patients are aware of their rights is another conversation, but often, patients are afraid to assert their rights in a space where they feel most vulnerable.

In line with this, medical aid restrictions limit patients to the procedure, often excluding psychological care and holistic wellness. Until hospitals begin recognising that women’s reproductive trauma deserves not only medical treatment but dignity, empathy and protected spaces for healing, too many women will continue to leave hospitals with wounds far deeper than the ones that can be stitched. DM