Immigrant women call for better interpreter access during births in Quebec City hospitals

This week, a news story on CBC NEWS highlighted the experience of an unaccompanied immigrant mother in Quebec City who underwent a traumatic birth.

This week, a news story on CBC highlighted the experience of an unaccompanied immigrant mother in Quebec City who underwent a traumatic birth. The mother not only experienced a horrific birth, but she wasn’t given an ENGLISH translator throughout the process. She was provided with French consent documents while being prepared for a potentially life-saving emergency cesarean section. She was told there was no time to wait for her English-speaking doula. Unfortunately, although some physicians communicated with her in English, most other staff could not. The hospital failed to provide her with an interpreter, despite patients having a legal right to receive services in English.

After the birth, the mother’s newborn was taken to a neonatal intensive care unit at another hospital, and she did not have the opportunity to see her baby. Furthermore, the mother was sent to a third hospital due to complications. This incident occurred in May 2024, and the experience continues to haunt her daily, understandably.

Marielle M’Bangha, the director of the Service de référence en périnatalité pour les femmes immigrantes de Québec (Perinatal Referral Service for Immigrant Women in Quebec City or SRPFIC), filed a complaint against the hospital. She speaks to a much larger trend she is seeing in the community: patients consenting to care don’t understand what they are consenting to due to a lack of access to interpreters. This raises a critical question: if English-speaking patients struggle to access interpreters, what does that mean for individuals who speak more marginalized languages?

Although the birth itself was challenging from the outset, the mother expressed that one of the most difficult aspects was feeling she had no control over what was happening to her. This experience could have been so different if she had been offered an interpreter and more adequate care. Regrettably, her case is neither unique nor isolated; across Canada, many individuals are not receiving adequate and appropriate care they deserve within the medical system.

These issues are central to our training on Birth and Reproductive Trauma, which aims to equip professionals from various backgrounds with the skills to support clients and patients, like the mother mentioned, who are dealing with trauma. While we recognize that there is still much work to be done, our training will empower more professionals to provide the necessary support and care to parents navigating this life-changing phase. Part of our work also involves highlighting where, as a country and society, we continue to fail the perinatal community.