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.