“What were you thinking?” someone barked at her.

“I was thinking of my child of course!” she responded. As soon as she opened her mouth and let out a mouthful of perfect Mandarin, she did not have to explain further. All around me, eyes narrowed, teeth clenched and blood pressures shot up. So she’s one of those women.

In 2010, half the 88,000 babies born in Hong Kong were born to mainland Chinese women who crossed the border to deliver their babies here so that their children would enjoy the rights and freedoms of our special administrative region. And in a city where anti-mainland sentiment is high, the draining of our city’s resources, including valuable hospital beds, by mainland women seemed unconscionable.

I knew that the shoeless lady was not going to make it in our ward. If her contractions didn’t get her then all of the other ladies — each one of us hormonal, bored and insanely frustrated over being bedridden in a hospital — would.

Somehow, though, she hung on. The shoeless lady did not deliver on that day. Or the next. While she waited, she talked. She admitted that she had put her child’s life in danger by running away from the hospital in Shenzhen but she had done it to give her child a chance at a real life. She wanted to offer her child the opportunity to have the freedoms she didn’t have, including the right to free speech, access to better schools and health care. And this push to give her child a better life, after all, is what being a mother is all about. To her, what she did was not reckless. It made perfect sense.

Slowly, the snickers and whispers subsided. Soon after, the shoeless lady got her wish. She delivered a healthy baby boy, who, by virtue of being born in Hong Kong and being ethnically Chinese, would enjoy the right to abode. When she emerged from the delivery room beaming a triumphant smile, we congratulated her.