ACCRA, 16 September (IRIN) - Sitting on a wooden bench in Ghana's biggest hospital, 28-year-old Gifty Torto breastfeeds her tiny six-week-old son, hugging the newborn she is not allowed to take home.
The baby is being detained pending payment of her hospital bill, so Torto since her discharge three weeks ago has been visiting the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit at Accra's Korle Bu teaching hospital twice a day to care for him.
The spacious hallway where the mother and baby sit, echoes to the cries of other newborns. Torto is one of 27 women whose infants are being detained in intensive care because of the mothers' inability to pay the high cost of difficult deliveries by Caeserean section.
She owes the hospital close to 3,000,000 cedis (about $340). More than a third of the 74 women in the neo-natal ICU too are unable to pay.
So Torto, who wears a pink ribbon in unkempt hair, turns up mornings and afternoons to breast-feed, bath and change her baby's clothes.
"It makes me feel uncomfortable," she told IRIN. "I feel very sad that l have to leave my baby here and sleep elsewhere. My husband has travelled but when he returns he will pay for me to leave."
Torto, who sells groceries on the street and whose husband is a carpenter, was referred to Ghana's biggest hospital when she developed complications at birth.
Holding babies back until parents pay their bills is not a new debt-collecting technique in this West African country. And it was to address this as well as other problems blocking many Ghanaians' access to quality health care that the government launched the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in 2004.
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