Bookmark
A top obstetrician on why men should NEVER be at the birth of their child | the Daily Mail
Well, this should burn up the wires. This top UK obstetrician, as he writes in the the UK Daily Mail thinks that men should not be allowed in the delivery room:
For many years, I have not been able to speak openly about my views that the presence of a father in a delivery room is not only unnecessary, but also hinders labour.
To utter such a thing over the past two decades would have been regarded as heresy, and flies in the face of popular convention.
But having been involved in childbirth for 50 years, and having been in charge of 15,000 births, I have reached the stage where I feel it is time to state what I – and many midwives and fellow obstetricians – privately consider the obvious.
That there is little good to come for either sex from having a man at the birth of a child.
This attitude seems to come right out of the 1950s when human sexuality and reproduction were kept out of sight and under the sheets and child-bearing was meant to be some mystery never understood by men. This guy even suggests that some eroticism is lost when dads see their wives in childbirth. I’m sure this attitude carries forward into keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and stuck in the nursery where fathers are never seen. Thank the heavens that we’ve come a long way from then. I’m sure the good doctor will get a lot of approving head nods from people wishing we also lived in a time where skirts covered women’s ankles and children were allowed to work in garment factories.
For my part, being in the delivery room was an experience I would never have missed. I was first to hold both my babies while doctors tended to my wife, but that didn’t interfere at all with her bonding with them just minutes later. We saw this as a very special experience that was the the first major event of our new family and I wouldn’t miss it no matter what a hundred “experts” say.
Popularity: 1%
Facebook comments:
When my wife went into labor with our second daughter, we were in the middle of a 2-foot dump of snow and whiteout conditions. We were planning to have her at home anyway, but even the midwives couldn't get there for the labor--the first arrived 5 minutes before the actual birth, the other afterward. My wife and I went through it together, and she said she felt as if I had saved her life, physically holding her up in the position she wanted to be in. Actually, I wish I'd had the chance to catch the baby myself, but then I wouldn't have been able to support my wife as she needed. I can't imagine missing out on the experience of the birth of my own child.
I think this OB reveals a lot when he starts out portraying the 'disastrous' impact of seeing childbirth as harming the eroticism in the marriage. Involved as an OB for 50 years, he's quite old, two generations older than today's parents, and he hasn't really adjusted to a society in which women want men to be with them, supporting them during labor--and the men can handle it. I'm glad they gave him the space to express his opinion, which is in the minority today, and we should recognize that there are still some men for whom being at the birth doesn't work. But just because some people have stumbled while adjusting to a new way, doesn't mean everyone needs to swing back to the old way. No man is forced to attend the birth, nor should be.
But for an OB to suggest that the man is a harmful presence? He's revealing his own prejudices. Look at the way he uses anecdotal evidence to scare in one place, elsewhere uses mythological language of the moment of love between the newborn and mom, and pseudo-scientifically invokes hormones even as he admits the issue hasn't been studied. Carefully reading his article is all that's needed to see the spurious reasoning in his argument that men be excluded from the birth room.
