It all started with Oriol. He was born dead. This was in 2019, when the Arnau de Vilanova Hospital in Lleida only had a basic protocol for cases of neonatal death. The mother of that child, Ester Mora, tried to follow all the steps she was advised to take to come to terms with the loss. She and her partner held their son for a long time to say goodbye properly, to have a real image of what they loved so much and had not been able to have. “Ask for the time, privacy, and silence you need,” indicates this first protocol, drafted in 2016. Those parents from Lleida spent half an hour with him in the same hospital room and, when the hospital staff took Oriol away to manage his body, they continued their mourning as best they could.

The Supreme Court has ordered two gynecologists to pay €35,000 in damages to a patient for using forceps and vacuum extraction during her delivery without her consent or prior notification. The ruling clarifies that, even without medical negligence, the failure to inform her beforehand about the instruments to be used and the associated risks violated her right to informed consent. The woman who brought the case to the Supreme Court to establish this precedent was 29 years old in March 2014 when she gave birth to her son in a Madrid hospital. She had received prenatal care at the same hospital in the preceding months, and all tests had come back normal. After three hours of contractions, the doctors attending her during the delivery used a vacuum extractor and forceps to deliver the baby. The postpartum period in the hospital went well, and after a few days, the woman was discharged. However, a year later, she was still experiencing pain in the episiotomy scar from her delivery. After trying various treatments, the pelvic pain persisted, and when her son was three years old, she filed a malpractice lawsuit.