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6. SIDE BY SIDE: Men Move into Delivery Rooms
- The University of North Carolina Press
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6 * side By side Men Move into Delivery Rooms Even as hospitals opened the labor-room doors to men, allowing them to be with their wives for the long hours of the first stage of labor, the same hospitals insisted that the men go back to the stork clubs to await the birth of their babies. The delivery-room exclusion policies began to be resisted, though, especially by advocates of natural childbirth and those men who had been with their wives during labor. Debates about whether to permit fathers into delivery rooms grew heated during these midcentury years. From the 1940s to 1970 the question was argued in medical meetings and aired in the press and popular magazines. State and local legislatures passed laws and ordinances about it. One husband was said to have chained himself to his wife to ensure his presence throughout, claiming, “I love her and she needs me.”1 Despite the pressure from an increasing numberof couples whowanted to be together when their baby entered the world, hospitals were slow to change their policies that excluded the men from delivery rooms. Practices varied widely around the country, by individual physician and hospital as well as by region, class, and race of the birthing woman. Among other issues, hospitals worried 196 * side By side about keeping infection out of what they considered to be an operating room and saddling the nurses with the additional responsibility of watching the men and tending to them if they fainted.This chapter pursues the story through the decade of the 1960s, theyears when the men, especially relatively privileged men, began to move into delivery rooms. The Pioneers, 1940s and 1950s In the 1940s most women did not have and did not expect to have their husbands with them during delivery. Hospital policies and board of health regulations typically barred fathers from delivery rooms primarily because of the fear of infections they might bring from the outside but also because of worries about lawsuits if something went wrong.The Chicago Board of Health, for example, forbade fathers from entering any surgical suite or delivery room, a policy it did not change until 1967, when the state of Illinois left the delivery-room decision to individual hospitals. Even for natural childbirth men were not welcomed. Joan Gerver, who participated in obstetrician Carl Javert’s “experiment” in unmedicated natural childbirth at New York Hospital in 1949, wrote, “Husbands were not included in the training orallowed in laborordelivery rooms. It never occurred to us that my husband should be in the delivery room. Nobody’s husband was. One’s expectations are influenced by the childbirth customs of the time and place.”2 A woman who had a frank breech vaginal delivery (in which the butt rather than the head presents first, making vaginal delivery more difficult ), with a long painful labor, provided one reason why women did not expect the company of their husbands. She wrote, “A few days later my mother told me she had never seen a man cryas Bernard had cried during the birth. I was glad he was kept out of the room.”3 Another woman, who delivered her baby at the Scranton State Hospital in 1943, wrote, “I would not have wanted my husband in the room, I really felt that the nurses in the room were really efficient and helpful.”4 Other women were more conflicted on the issue. Moya Sullivan wrote about her 1945 delivery at Beth David Hospital in New York: “I think if my mother or my husband had been in the delivery room, I would have felt happier. But by the same [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:13 GMT) side By side * 197 token, they could not have taken away the pain and seeing me in pain would have caused them much distress.”5 Many women in the 1950s still felt that they did not want their husbands with them. Mildred Cherry, forexample, picked for herattendant a woman physician who spoke her native Yiddish, and she had a happy experience at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. She wrote, “I would have liked my husband to be with me in the labor room, but I’m not sure I would have wanted him in the delivery room. Perhaps that’s because I knew it wasn’t possible and therefore didn’t consider it.”6 Many birthing women did not include their husbands when they planned their deliveries. Despite her sister being a nurse...