Today is March 8 International Women’s Day.

Greeting this day, our women are filled with a sense of immense pride of being able to enjoy to the full the benefits of the most superior socialist health care system in the world.

The Pyongyang Maternity Hospital is one source of such pride.

“Not only the Korean women but also foreign women I’ve met all boasted of having given birth at the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital blooming with socialist public health measures. The Maternity Hospital really is a wonderful place and no different from what I’ve heard. Like what all Korean women say, I, too, feel like staying at my parents’ house.”

This is what the wife of the former UNICEF deputy representative in the DPRK said after giving birth to an adorable baby boy at the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

43 years from now, in July 1980, the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital was built as a modern comprehensive hospital devoted to delivery assistance, gynaecological treatment, and other professional medical service, true to the noble intentions of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il that healthy mothers are a prerequisite for healthy children who will, in turn, guarantee the future of the country.

The hospital covers a total floor space of over 60,000㎡ and the building’s exterior has been design to give an aura of a person embracing the patients with open arms. It has more than 2,000 big and small wards including ones for delivery, surgery, and babies room.

It is completely equipped with 100 kinds of up-to-date medical equipment like multi-purpose digital X-ray machine, digital breast tumour scanner and incubator, as well as a comprehensive patient monitor used for delivery assistance and patient care, unified disinfection system, central oxygen supply system, etc.

Women who check into the hospital receive medical assistance entirely at the expense of the state. That is to say that our country’s overall free medical care system is also being implemented at the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Paraplegic women also give birth to healthy babies at Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

The state provides all women who are delivered of babies at this hospital with many tonics and medicines including bee milk honey. These are all free of charge.

More surprising is the state’s measure of love taken for triplets and quadruplets.

Airplanes fly for triplets or quadruplets and their mothers. Doctors and nurses are provided for each baby. And silver knives for boys and golden rings for girls are given to triplets or quadruplets.

Since the opening of the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital, 536 triplets and 7 quadruplets are born. How much money the state has spent for them is hard to calculate.

Medical workers treat patients as their own sisters lest they feel slightest discomfort. This is a special feature peculiar to Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

A nursing mother came from Samjiyon City, Ryanggang Province located in the northern part of the country said as follows:

I don’t have any siblings or relatives in Pyongyang. But medical workers of the hospital visited me almost every day with foods that suit my taste. And after delivery, they brought me with baby clothes.

She felt no worries or anxieties as if she were at home. So on the day when she left hospital she expressed her feeling of gratitude to our socialist system that all people form one big family and take care one another.

Today, women in our country unanimously call Pyongyang Maternity Hospital “my sweet home” and “palace of love for babies”.