The Egyptian Medical Syndicate has demanded formal complaints before investigating allegations of systemic physical and sexual abuse against women in labor at Alexandria’s El-Shatby University Hospital, following widespread social media outrage over a former doctor’s testimony, officials said on Tuesday.
The public testimony, published by Omnia Swedan—a documentary filmmaker and former resident physician who completed her residency in the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department—has ignited fierce public anger.
Swedan exposed what she termed “systemic violations” against female patients, including sexual harassment during childbirth, physical assault, and the deliberate withholding of emergency medical care based on moralizing and social prejudices.
While social media users widely circulated the testimony, which described the prestigious university hospital as a “pathological environment,” the Egyptian Medical Syndicate responded with a defensive statement.
The syndicate demanded that these allegations be channeled into “official complaints” while simultaneously warning against what it described as “undermining the efforts of doctors or resorting to generalization.”
In her testimony, Swedan, who graduated from medical school in 2020 before making the shift to filmmaking, detailed harrowing accounts of the inner workings of the historic university hospital, citing four specific incidents that she wrote “will never be erased from my memory.”
Swedan leveled a direct accusation against one physician for sexually harassing a 19-year-old woman. As the teenager screamed during her first labor, the physician allegedly performed a cervical examination with deliberate physical violence, explicitly claiming he was “disciplining her for screaming,” while the nursing staff stood by and laughed.
In another incident, Swedan recalled a doctor slapping a laboring woman across the face while a nurse verbally abused her. When Swedan and a fellow resident expressed shock at the violence, they were mocked by both the doctor and the nurse, who ridiculed them as “delicate little flowers with weak stomachs.”
The allegations also point to a deeper structural denial of care. Swedan detailed the “deliberate refusal” to treat an attempted rape survivor who arrived at the hospital with a ruptured uterus and active hemorrhaging. The medical staff reportedly refused to treat her, asserting that her appearance—specifically “her clothing and the cigarettes she had with her”—proved she did not deserve medical assistance.
Similarly, the staff refused to manage an incomplete miscarriage for an abused woman because she could not produce a marriage certificate. Swedan noted that the patient was at imminent risk of developing life-threatening preeclampsia while “the masters in charge” refused to provide any medical service until someone brought the document.
“I had to admit her under my own personal responsibility,”Swedan wrote. “I filled out her admission ticket, only to be ordered to write a humiliating label on it: ‘Suspected illicit pregnancy.’”
Beyond individual cases of abuse, the testimony shed light on systemic, institutionalized “obstetric violence.” This includes the routine performance of episiotomies—a surgical cut of the perineum to enlarge the vaginal opening during natural birth—and the controversial “husband’s stitch,” a non-medical procedure designed to tighten the vagina after delivery.
Swedan also exposed the practice of applying aggressive elbow pressure to a mother’s abdomen immediately after delivery to force the placenta out. This is done, she noted, “because we don’t have twenty minutes to wait for it to detach naturally, or even to administer Oxytocin.”
Furthermore, Swedan accused some medical staff of performing unnecessary cesarean sections solely to line their pockets, quoting colleagues who justified the operations as a way “to pay off the installments on our Alamein beach chalets.”
Conversely, other patients were forced to undergo natural labor under highly unsafe conditions. The hospital also reportedly refused to admit critically ill women to the intensive care unit without the written consent of a husband, father, or brother, completely disregarding the mother’s own legal autonomy and consent.
In its official response, the Egyptian Medical Syndicate stated that it is monitoring the situation but maintained that “dealing with any allegations must occur through the specialized official channels.”
The syndicate stated it had not yet received any documented complaints regarding these incidents, urging Swedan and any affected patients to file formal reports with the syndicate, the administration of Alexandria University, or the Public Prosecution.
While the syndicate asserted that any negligent party proven to have committed violations would be held accountable with “decisiveness and transparency,” it fiercely rejected “casting doubt on the role of Egyptian doctors.”
The statement emphasized that university hospitals play a pivotal role in treating millions of citizens, warning against “generalizations” that could tarnish the reputation of thousands of physicians working under immense systemic challenges.
The explosive testimony comes on the heels of a recent institutional crisis at El-Shatby. The hospital administration had sparked widespread outrage among medical staff after issuing a highly controversial directive banning intern doctors from entering operating and emergency rooms, a decision critics argued “demolished the educational mission of the teaching hospital” and reflected deteriorating conditions inside the facility. Following intense pushback, the administration reversed the ban, introducing new regulatory guidelines to allow interns back into operating theaters.
In response to the revelations, the “Safe Medical Care for Women” initiative has demanded that official state bodies launch an immediate investigation into the allegations raised by Swedan and publish the findings to the public.
The initiative—which operates under the Cairo Foundation for Development and Law—stressed that these allegations highlight an "urgent need to enact legislation that criminalizes all forms of obstetric violence."
The group called for the immediate institutionalization and enforcement of a “Professional Code of Conduct” across all healthcare facilities to protect patient privacy, eliminate stigma and discrimination, and establish robust monitoring and training mechanisms.
This, they argued, is the only way to ensure the delivery of healthcare that preserves human dignity and ends the culture of impunity surrounding professional violations committed against women during pregnancy and childbirth.
