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Conservative author and podcaster Candace Owens gave a harrowing account of her hospital experience when she gave birth to her second child, a daughter, in July.
As she returned to her Daily Wire podcast, “The Candace Owens Show,” this week, she talked about difficulties in dealing with what she described as the “medical mafia” during her stay in a Tennessee hospital. Specifically, Owens said she and her husband were inundated with unreasonable requests by the facility which she believes was part of an effort to generate additional revenue, so they refused to comply.
As such, she explained that the hospital threatened to decline their insurance and have them charged with a misdemeanor, as well as contacting child protective services.
Owens explained in an interview with the Daily Mail that the hospital, Ascension Saint Thomas in Nashville, also would not help her deal with her primary complaint which was a lack of sleep for her and her newborn, which the couple named Louise Marie Farmer — a situation she described as “24 hours of torture.”
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Owens, 32, said that the alleged maltreatment began after she refused to take antibiotics as well as medications to induce contractions as she went into labor. And she said the hospital tried to keep her more than 48 hours after her daughter’s birth so that her insurance would not cover the stay.
After she and husband George Farmer refused and began to leave, she says a hospital pediatrician bluntly told them “that she watched a baby die in the 47th hour because her parents refused to stay.”
But the couple ignored the physician and other staffers’ false claims that their insurance would not cover the cost of care, the Daily Mail said, adding:
When Owens responded that she didn’t care, a social worker employed by the hospital asked the couple to sign a document that said they were aware that The Department of Children’s Services (DCS) could pay them a visit for leaving against doctor’s orders, according to Owens.
The mother of two said she and her husband wanted to leave so badly because they “just wanted to sleep.”
Owens – who welcomed her first child in January 2021 – began the begrudged account Saturday by recalling how she declined both antibiotics and the contraction-inducing drug Pitocin while going into labor for the second time last July.
“I had been very vocal about not wanting to be loaded up with unnecessary drugs during labor,” she said, noting that she had not had any problems during both pregnancies and deliveries.
“The doctor wanted me to take antibiotics, and I declined. Because I declined, they wanted me to stay in the hospital for 48 hours – and big coincidence, that’s the maximum amount that insurance will cover,” she told the outlet.
After Owens and her husband signaled a refusal to take the drugs and stay the allotted time, they were hit with a series of justifications by staff as well as some not-so-veiled threats, the podcaster asserted. She said a head nurse even warned “if I left before” the 48-hour window, “I would be charged with a misdemeanor.”
“That’s when the true torture really began, revealed Owens – describing how workers, whom she referred to as ‘the hospital mafia,’ harassed her in her room as she and the baby attempted to rest, repeatedly knocking on the door and doing ‘check-ins’ through all hours of the night,” the Daily Mail reported. “One such check-in, Owens said, saw a staffer barge into the commentator’s room as she slept at 4 am, and ‘unclothe’ her sleeping baby ‘to weigh her naked on a cold scale.'”
“That’s what they do,” Owens explained, noting that she wanted to leave after 24 hours but was told, “you can’t leave until you take this test until you get the antibiotics.”
“As a result, when we asked to leave after 24 hours of torture in the form of relentless knocks – the hospital mafia descended,” she said.
After she was threatened with the misdemeanor, Owens said she conceded and allowed the hospital staff to draw some blood from her newborn daughter.
After the experience, she says she plans to use her growing platform to reform the U.S. healthcare system.
“We need to start to realize what the medical industry is and what it has become – a wire discussion in the era of Covid,” she said. “So many parents and women go through that, not in control of their child, feeling threatened. Doing that show will allow me to continue that discussion.”
