1/Many of you know that I have reported from many tense and emotional situations, namely covering school shootings in the United States. Covering childbirth in Venezuela was by far the most harrowing reporting experience I have had. https://nyti.ms/2Vm6b4f 

2/We wanted to understand what it is like to give birth in a place where the government refuses to release maternal and infant death statistics. So we — this reporter, with @MeridithKohut @IsayenHG and @surdaneta — followed women to 6 Venezuelan hospitals and 1 across the border.

3/We found Venezuelan hospitals so stripped of the basics — vital sign monitors, sanitation systems, antibiotics — that doctors are sending women from hospital to hospital in a harrowing journey known as the ruleta, or roulette. In the worst cases, they die. Or their babies do.

4/The women and doctors we followed sometimes risked significant punishment to speak with us. We thank them.

5/This is Milagros Vásquez, a former high school athletic star we met one afternoon outside a hospital in Caracas. Over two days, we traveled with her to hospital after hospital as she pleaded for doctors to help her give birth.

6/This is one of the more dramatic scenes I have ever witnessed. Here is Cristina Vásquez, begging Venezuela’s largest maternity ward to let her pregnant daughter in.

A guard with a baton waited on the other side.

7/In this video, Milagros Vásquez, desperate for help and rejected by five Venezuelan hospitals, passes out in front of the country's largest maternity ward. Strong language here, strong emotion.

8/How did we report this? We waited with women for days outside hospitals. We spent hours inside hospitals. We crossed the border into Colombia on foot. We could not have done this without the backing of the @nytimes, which is supported by you — the reader.