Saving Babies’ Lives by Carrying Them Like Kangaroos

Skin-to-skin contact sustains premature babies where incubators are limited. It may even be the best form of neonatal care, period.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/kangaroo-care/515844/

Carmela Torres was 18 when she became pregnant for the first time. It was 1987 and she and her now-husband, Pablo Hernandez, were two idealistic young Colombians born in the coastal region of Montería who moved to the capital, Bogotá, in search of freedom and a better life. When Torres told her father she was expecting, so angered was he by the thought of his daughter having a child out of wedlock that they didn’t speak to each other for years.

Before she had a chance to hold him, her baby was whisked off to a neonatal intensive-care unit. Torres was simply told to get dressed and go home. “I didn’t even get to touch him,” she says. “They said I could come back and see him but the visiting times were very restricted—just a couple of hours a day. When I did visit I was allowed to look but not touch.”

(click link above to read the story on theatlantic.com)