I have always wanted to go visit Russia. I have an incredible love of Moscow and St. Petersburg and all the old European beauty. I also love the language, guttural though it may be, and I’m always up for a bowl of borscht and some Chicken Kiev.

But something I read thanks to AdventureDad makes me want to go to Russia for the sole purpose of going to a hospital to throttle the holy living hell out of some of the staff. If you like kids, this situation will likely outrage you and possibly make you cry like I did; you’ve been warned.

Apparently, some of the staff in a Russian hospital is tired of hearing the hospitalized babies cry. Their solution is to GAG THEM. Let me say that again, for the sake of clarity. They are GAGGING BABIES, covering their mouths with tape so that instead of crying they are reduced to letting out muffled cries. (That story includes a video which is extremely disturbing, watch at your own emotional risk.)

Let’s forget for a second the safety issues. Let’s forget that one badly-adhered bit of tape could come loose and cause a baby to choke to death. Let’s forget that if a baby throws up while gagged he or she could then choke to death on their own vomit. Let’s pretend those aren’t factors.

Those babies, those poor little helpless babies, are being de-humanized. Instead of being tiny people, they are being treated as nothing more than a nagging nuisance. They are having their only means of communication stripped away because apparently that communication is annoying.

No one likes hearing a baby cry. There are a small handful of times that you’re relieved to hear babies cry. When they’re first born and take that first breath. When they take a really bad fall and you don’t know if they’re okay. That first time they sleep for a really long time and you’re sitting in the living room wondering whether to be relieved that they’re sleeping or worried that they’re dead. Beyond that, no one likes to hear crying. It usually means something is wrong, even if it’s just that your baby is unhappy. And when you’ve heard crying for a long period of time, you wish for anything in the world to happen to make it stop.

I’m a mother. I have two kids. I have heard more crying than I can put into words. I have heard hungry crying, colic crying, “ow oh my god that hurts” crying, sibling rivalry crying, tantrum crying, “woe is me no one loves me” crying, and more. I am human. I have, as a result, made many jokes about taping someone’s mouth shut to stop the crying.

I have never once been serious about that. I would never actually DO it. And because I am, despite my imperfections, a fundamentally good person and decent mother, I never could have imagined that anyone would seriously do it, especially in a hospital where the staff’s job description is supposed to include caring for people.

I am so horrified that these poor babies have been subjected to gags. I am disgusted that it’s only because of an equally horrified patient with a cameraphone that we’re aware of what is happening.

How can anyone take a poor defenseless infant and gag them? I remember when Breanna was born, the woman who shared my room laid in bed while her newborn cried and cried in her bassinet. The mother rarely picked her up to hold her or try to feed her and the father slept on a couch out in the hallway, apparently too tired from… I don’t know, from not having given birth? to come in and do something. I had a curtain pulled around my bed so I gave the mom the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe she was trying to soothe her baby; it was only the next morning when I heard the nurse asking how often she had fed her baby that I found out that in the span of 12 hours she had fed her baby TWICE, for a grand total of ten minutes. Ten minutes of milk for a newborn baby in 12 hours. Also, she had not had a c-section or a traumatic birth, she had delivered vaginally in a fairly routine birth but she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed to care for her infant. I was tired and a little sore myself, but I took care of the baby I had brought into the world dammit.

And at the time I was appalled that a mother would essentially ignore her baby, doing nothing more than occasionally calling out a half-hearted “shhh” to her crying child. I worried about what would happen to that baby at home.

Now I am even more appalled that a hospital with staff who are supposed to take proper care of their patients would think that the best way to deal with crying babies is to literally shut their mouths. I worry about the safety of those tiny babies who can’t stand up for themselves and say, “hey! I am a human being and I deserve better than this!” I worry about how this will effect them down the road.

I know different cultures approach childcare in different ways, but I can’t believe that anyone could have ever thought this was a good idea, or safe, or humane.