MATERNITY SERVICE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22099, 1 November 1933, Page 5

MATERNITY SERVICE

TO THE EDITOK. SlB, —The Maternity Hospital has become a burning question and some of our women are very indignant concerning the latest developments. Mr Knight’s report in this morning’s Daily Times makes a regular smoke screen, and our -women will not know what a real job will be launched on them if our Government is worried into granting thousands of pounds of public money to build a maternity hospital on such a site as that in Castle street, opposite the General Hospital, with all sorts of infectious diseases and heavy fogs and whistles and the constant roar of traffic, which will be increased, we hope, as years go by with an increased shipping. If the foundations of St. Helens were satisfactory, whv not build up there in the sunshine? Why should the students and their specialist be the only persons considered? It makes a woman ashamed that the Hospital Board should consider the economy of heating pipes, considering that £SOOO will be used in bricks and mortar. Does it not seem a shame that Dunedin, with her 600 acres of Town Belt and a wealthy church owning tracts of land, cannot grant a section of a few acres fco build a home for our suffering women,

the mothers of our future sons and daughters, and that they should be taken to such a place as has been suggested, with all its risks and noise? The students will be largely birds of passage. During the few years that they are at the University it would not matter if they had to go out of town for their knowledge and practice. The way in which the Batchelor Hospital has been used is shameful. The poor little baby that was born in the bathroom has been made a stalking horse to show how very bad affairs were. We should remember that, as death comes suddenly, so occasionally does birth, and that one who has been noteworthy in the world was born in a manger because there was no room at an inn. I do hope our mothers will have a beautiful hospital with every chance of recovery and with the quietness that is so essential. —I am, etc., A Mother of Seven.