'Pregnancy epidemic' among neo-natal nurses

A photo of the expectant mums, along with their department head – who is, fortunately, immune, being a man – has gone viral since it was posted on Twitter and staff who are not planning to have kids any time soon have joked about identifying the chair their colleagues have been sitting on in order to avoid it.

“We've found the solution to Spain's falling birth rate,” the post, on neo-natal boss Dr Félix Castillos' Twitter page, reads.

“At the moment, it's just a transmitted outbreak with a known cause and seven cases identified.

“But we're hoping it'll become an epidemic. The only problem will be covering for them all at once.”

In keeping with Spain's high average age for becoming a mother, all bar one of the seven are between mid-30s and mid-40s.

A typical first-time mum in Spain is aged 32, although with foreign resident mothers tending to be much younger than Spaniards, the average age for women starting a family would be much higher if only natives were counted.

Over 70% of women aged 35 do not have children, even if they would like to, and one in five first-time mums is aged over 40 – but at least this means women are starting to see that they do not have to rush to become a mother when it is now socially acceptable, and medically sound, for them to do so any time up to the menopause.

Fertility clinics are now experiencing a boom with IVF increasingly sought by single women, lesbians and older would-be mums, and with more and more females freezing their eggs so they do not have to worry about running out of time.

Private clinics in Spain will perform IVF or insemination on women up to and including age 50, although at least two cases of women in their early 60s giving birth have been reported in recent years.

In the case of the Vall d'Hebron newborn unit, the youngest of the seven pregnant nurses is Pili Cortés, 31, and the eldest is Elena Balagué, 47.

The others, in age order, are Silvia Muñoz, 32; Cristina Jiménez, 34; Sandra Cristóbal, 36; Ana Gros, 37, and Marta Moreno, 41.

But the downside to their happy conditions is that the nature of their job means they cannot hide their good fortune from parents who are facing exactly the opposite, and the nurses are conscious of rubbing salt in the wound by their mere presence.

“There are days when it's not easy at all,” admits Sandra.

“You're caring for a baby born at 24 or 25 weeks – at times, younger than the baby you're carrying inside you. You look at the infant and you look at yourself and think, wow. And you have to support the mum emotionally while you're obviously pregnant yourself; you're healthily pregnant and her premature baby is fighting for his or her life,” says the nurse, who works in the intensive care section and is already in her 36^th week of gestation.

The Vall d'Hebron's neo-natal unit is the largest in Spain, staffed by 178 doctors and nurses, and is currently caring for 45 babies described as 'high risk', in critical and semi-critical conditions, many of them born very prematurely.

Another 24 are now out of intensive care and will soon be discharged, four are hospitalised along with their mothers but are out of danger, and a further 12 are now at home with their mothers and being cared for by home nurses.

Dr Castillos admits that in his 30 years of working at the Vall d'Hebron, this is the first time ever he has witnessed 'such an explosion of pregnancies all at once'.

Photograph: Dr Félix Castillos on Twitter (@felixcastillos2)