Security for Babies

When a baby got stolen from a civic hospital in the city, the matter reached the High Court, which directed the civic body to set up security measures to prevent theft of newborns from the hospitals run by the civic body. One of the measures was to place security officers outside the ward that had the mothers with their newborns. Since the hospital did not have sufficient number of security officers, private security officers were hired for the job. We started seeing them outside the labor ward, postnatal ward and the postoperative ward where the newborn babies were kept. We needed security at all places, but the administration expressed inability to give more security officers. A curious observation was that security officers were placed outside the antenatal ward too, where the babies were inside the women's abdomens. "How do they think anyone can steal the babies inside their mothers' tummies?" one of us asked. "They perhaps know that sometimes women deliver in the antenatal ward itself. They do not want to be pulled up for contempt of court. SO they covered that ward too." I said. "In the antenatal ward?" "Sometimes the patients do not tell the nurse that they have labor pains. Sometimes the nurse does not tell the doctor in time. Sometimes the doctor does not listen or does not make a diagnosis of labor. Sometimes more than one of these factors is operational. Women still deliver in the antenatal ward occasionally." "We must stop that." "Yes, we must. I keep trying. But I cannot control all people at all times. In the meantime, I am not telling administration that there are no newborn babies in this ward, or they might take away those security officers. It is sometimes better to let mistakes remain uncorrected."