Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room

Epilogue: EXPECTANT FATHERS’ EXPECTATIONS

e P i l o G U e exPeCTanT faThers’ exPeCTaTions With the presence of fathers in delivery and birthing rooms across the country well established by the mid-1980s, except in some crowded public hospitals that continued to be pockets of inequality of access, laymen had conquered all the important spaces of hospital obstetrics. They had moved out of the constraining waiting rooms into the rooms where their wives labored, and they had also managed—with a lot of help from their wives, childbirth educators, the women’s movement, supportive doctors and nurses, and community activity—to find a place for themselves amid the equipment-filled delivery rooms to be there for the event of birth itself. They had helped the transition from separate labor and delivery rooms to homelike birthing rooms. They had also helped to open the doors to nonhusbands, those others, including male lovers, lesbian partners , adoptive parents, and other friends, family members, and siblings, whom the woman had identified as necessary to her well-being.1 Hospital delivery rooms in the early twenty-first century often contain large numbers of people, as many women want to share the experience widely. As one author put it, “The door to the delivery room has ePiloGUe * 285 swung wide open. Even the most traditional hospitals now allow multiple guests.” Opening new facilities in 2005, Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago included a “Family Zone”—extra space—in the delivery room near the head of the mother’s bed in order to have room for all the people the birthing woman might want to have with her.2 Indeed, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin teaches her medical students and residents how to “manage a crowd” around the delivery bed. Dr. Cynthia Haq said, “It is not now uncommon to have half a dozen people or even more with the mother in the room at the time of birth.”3 Multiple visitors and observers have become so common that some birthing couples feel pressure from their friends to attend. In a syndicated newspaper column, “Letter to Prudie,” a “Private Parent” wrote that she and her husband wanted to limit attendance in the delivery room but worried that “friends and family have been talking about the day as if they plan to be in the delivery room with us.” Prudie was “stunned” and opined that “giving birth is neither a party nor a social occasion. . . . Just tell anyone and everyone that you will not be entertaining on the day the baby is born.”4 Television again helps us to understand some of the trends that are common at the turn of the twenty-first century. The popular nBC show Friends, for example, demonstrated the new use of hospital spaces.When the character Rachel gave birth on the May 16, 2002, episode, Ross, the father of the baby and not married to Rachel, remained with her throughout labor and delivery. And the fathers’ waiting room was transformed from the spacewhere the man paced alone and anxious into a placewhere lots of friends and relatives could gather. It became a staging area from which they all could visit the laboring woman and into which the father could retreat from the emotional activity to get revitalized by the support of his friends.5 Most of the men who fought their way in to their wives’ delivery rooms and those who walked in on the coattails of others who preceded them were glad to be there.They wanted to support their partners, they wanted to be witnesses to the births of their children, and they found that both motivations helped them to bond with their families in new and mutually beneficial ways. Men have helped one another through the event, and 286 * ePiloGUe many have formed support groups on the Internet and in local hospitals around the country to teach others meaningful ways to participate in childbirth.6 How has making “room for daddy” mattered in childbirth history? We can never know, of course, how things might have changed without the active participation of the men. But we do know that the men— often spurred on by their wives and by changing cultural perceptions of proper male behavior—made a difference. They created unprecedented new roles for themselves to participate in a traditionally women’s event; they helped to make hospitals more flexible in how they handled birth...