“It’s very difficult, it’s heavy. My stomach hurts. I turn from one side to the other. I have pain in my lower abdomen, it’s pulling. I don’t know anyone here, I came like that. I thought God would help me. But nothing works. It’s harder than I imagined. » Naminata, 20 years old and 7 months pregnant with twins, landed at Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis, after sleeping outside for three days the first week of January in Paris. She is one of the dozens of homeless pregnant women that the hospital sees pass through every year, and who sometimes squat in hospital beds due to a lack of emergency accommodation. A situation that has become increasingly widespread in recent years in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, the two departments where the emergency accommodation situation is the most critical.
Especially since these migrant women, in addition to being pregnant, have very difficult life journeys, with often complex pathologies. That of Naminata, for example, is peppered with violence. The young woman had to leave her home in Ivory Coast at the age of 17 because of an abusive and violent stepfather, who, she says, put out his cigarettes on her skin. She fled to Morocco when the man, released for a bribe by the police, threatened to kill her. There, the hellish life continued, according to her testimony: housed with a man who raped her, she had to flee again. After waiting for a month in the desert, she crossed the sea, but her boat capsized, carrying her share of dead. The Spanish Red Cross saved her, and from there she took a car to Paris.
“Women more vulnerable than others”
“I walked and walked. I slept on bus stops. I didn’t really close my eyes. I only had a coat. When I arrived at the hospital, I was very tired,” she says. In theory, Naminata, hospitalized in the high-risk pregnancy department but whose examinations were ultimately good, should have left the hospital after a few days. But because of the critical emergency accommodation situation in the department, the hospital is forced to keep her in its department longer than planned.
A situation which despairs Raphaël Walczak, midwife coordinator: “We have patients who do not have accommodation, who we keep in hospital, even though they could have been discharged if they had accommodation. With a newborn, it is not possible to live on the street, and for pregnant patients, who were hospitalized in GHR [grossesse à haut risque], we think that we cannot put them back on the streets like that. They are more vulnerable than others. Imagine a woman who has broken her water without being full term: usually, she can return home with supervision, but on the street, with the hygienic conditions we know and the risks of infection, It is not possible. »
What is happening at Delafontaine hospital is not an isolated case. In Paris, midwife Véronique Boulinguez, who meets these future homeless mothers, estimates that a woman less than 7 months pregnant has almost no chance of finding emergency accommodation. However, “you can be pregnant at 6 months with pathologies,” she believes, also outraged by the fact that only families with infants less than a month old find space. And again, in difficult conditions: “Families have to change accommodation every five or six days. Is this how you recover from a cesarean section, from childbirth? »
Numerous consequences for the newborn and the mother
For Véronique Boulinguez, who has been in office for eight years, the situation began to deteriorate “around 2018-2019”. “Before, when we saw a pregnant woman in the street, we panicked. Then we started to have maternity leave without accommodation. » In 2023, the Cité Maternal Protection Center, to which Véronique Boulinguez is attached, saw 531 pregnant women (different). A figure that has been constantly increasing since its opening in 2019. At Delafontaine hospital, if the situation has improved since this summer, where around twenty patients who did not require hospitalization were present due to lack of accommodation, there remains still “seven or eight women” who are there by default, “half for more than a month”, according to midwife Edith Rain.
What has changed in public opinion so that today we are used to seeing pregnant women on the street? Why is this situation not more taken care of? So many questions that caregivers and elected officials are asking themselves. “What I find crazy is that a few years ago this type of situation would have sparked a massive revolt,” thundered Senator Ian Brossat in our columns last October. A few days ago, a woman left Delafontaine hospital after staying 95 days in a row on the premises. But to go to a gym. “It’s dehumanizing a woman and her newborn… And it’s ignoring the consequences on these children, who can then develop attachment disorders, or risky behaviors during adolescence,” protests Raphaël Walczak.
Pregnant women in the street also develop all kinds of problems, and the baby’s growth is directly threatened, with, according to Paola Luiz, coordinating midwife at the Cité Maternal Protection Center, “less fetal growth, and therefore smaller children.” and more fragile at birth. “They are more likely to have a premature birth,” adds Véronique Boulinguez. Not to mention the stress suffered by the mother, which we know has consequences on the development of the fetus.
Women with “incredible strength”
The State’s failings despair the caregivers, who, exhausted, end up leaving the ship one by one. “Our mission is to welcome pregnant patients, to support them, to ensure that everything goes well. But here we are on missions that go beyond our fields,” regrets Raphaël Walczak, also worried about his patients with stable accommodation, to whom he must regularly announce that they will have to be transferred to another hospital, due to lack of space. “It is extremely violent for caregivers to have to give an exit paper to a woman who we know is taking risks by putting her back on the street,” says Véronique Boulinguez indignantly. I don’t know if our leaders understand that…”
Naminata, for her part, doesn’t know how she’s going to get out of this situation. While she has to deal with the arrival of her twins, and she has nowhere to go, the young woman says she is also stressed by the situation of her mother, who does not have enough to eat. “Since I was born, I have not had peace of heart. My dad died at 12 years old. When I was little, my father and my mother didn’t get along. I sold bags. I carried people’s groceries for money,” she explains, before sobbing. But she quickly pulls herself together: “I can’t stay in the hospital, it’s not a hotel. I have to look for accommodation and a job. »
Raphaël Walczak says he admires these patients: “They have incredible strength to still be standing with everything they have been through. We greatly admire athletes who set a goal, but compared to the strength they put into not living but surviving, it’s nothing at all. And they remain invisible to everyone. »