Oct 6, 2010 / 01:08 am
The Knights of Malta-operated Holy Family Hospital of Bethlehem is expecting the imminent delivery its 50,000th baby after 20 years of operation. Its backers have created a website “birth clock” to track the approach of the landmark.
As of Oct. 5, 49,824 babies had been delivered. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta reopened Holy Family Hospital in 1990 as a maternity hospital which refuses no one on the basis of race, religion or ability to pay.
A girl named Dina Atik was the first baby delivered on Feb. 26, 1990. Her parents Marlen and Edward had married a year earlier at the Church of the Nativity.
While the hospital has since become the premier institution of the district, the first-time mother Marlen was afraid because the medical center had just opened. “The staff was very nice and everybody was calming me down,” she said. “When Dina was born, everybody was so happy.”