Pau (AFP)

A 51-year-old Belgian anesthetist prosecuted for a fatal childbirth she had performed while drunk, in September 2014 in Orthez (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison and banned from practicing Medicine.

The judgment of the Criminal Court of Pau, in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution during the hearing in early October, was pronounced in the absence of the defendant, Helga Wauters, who had appeared free.

A warrant of committal was not issued against the anesthesiologist, who at the time had been in pre-trial detention for two months.

The Belgian doctor was prosecuted for a series of medical errors while intervening, under the influence of alcohol, in the cesarean delivery of Xynthia Hawke, a 28-year-old Briton, on September 26, 2014.

Installed in France, the young Xynthia, originally from Somerset, had died four days later following a lack of oxygen, without having seen her baby, unharmed.

According to the investigation, the doctor, in office for ten days, had intubated the digestive tract, instead of the respiratory tract, without noticing it.

Then she had used a manual balloon instead of the OR's respirator, which she did not know how to operate, witnesses said.

"A carnage", according to the prosecutor at the hearing.

In front of the investigators, the anesthetist will admit having started his day, "like every day", with a mixture of water and vodka, and to have drunk again in the evening.

At her home, the gendarmes had found 14 bottles of vokda.

Helga Wauters was also ordered to pay nearly 1.4 million euros in damages and interest for various damages to the victim's relatives: her son, her companion at the time, her sister and the parents. by Xynthia Hawke, Helen and Fraser Hawke.

"The justice gave an example for this type of doctor, who is not in my eyes a doctor, (justice) was until the end by pronouncing these 3 years firm and especially the prohibition to exercise, this which also shows that it is an incompetent person ", reacted Thursday Yannick Balthazar, companion of the time of the victim and father of their son.

© 2020 AFP