Former Time magazine health care journalist Christine Gorman recently wrote the text for an AJN photo-essay about the nursing shortage in Malawi. Here’s what we posted  about it a little while back, with links to the photos and article. Now CNN is running an excellent story by Gorman on the topic. Here’s the article—and click on the image at the left to go to the video.

Every morning at 7 a.m., I get up and watch the Today Show. Yesterday morning, I heard this: “a young woman, eight months pregnant . . . found murdered on Monday. Twenty-three-year-old Darlene Haynes was discovered in the closet of her Worcester, Massachusetts apartment—her fetus had been taken from her womb.” I immediately checked to see if the channel had somehow been changed—it certainly sounded like the beginning of an episode of Law and Order: SVU.

Nonfamily infant abductions may be rare, but they do happen. And in some cases, they can turn violent. According to AJN’s September 2008 article, “Nonfamily Infant Abductions, 1983-2006,” which compared cases from 1983–1992 with those from 1993–2006, from the earlier to the later period the preferred abduction location changed: the percentage of infant abductions from health care facilities decreased, while the percentage of those from private residences nearly doubled. In 22 of the 247 cases studied, the mother was killed, and in nine of the 22 cases, a cesarean section was performed to remove the fetus from the womb, as occurred in the Darlene Haynes story. […]