In the 1940s Dr Robert A. Bradley was training in obstetrics and studying
what happened when husbands were allowed into the delivery room, though not
when the baby actually emerged. He concluded that a spouse’s presence seemed
to help labouring mothers to relax. When their spouses left, the women grew
anxious. Bradley’s theory crystallised when one of the women, moments after
delivering, grabbed the doctor to thank him with kisses and hugs. “Oh, thank
you, thank you for showing me how,” she said.
Bradley later wrote: “It hit me like a sledge-hammer. What was this lovely
woman kissing me for? Why was I the object of her gratitude as a labour
coach while her young lover sat uselessly in the waiting room, fearful and
anxious over his sweetheart’s safety, eagerly wishing to see the outcome of
his love for her, yet deprived of the most meaningful emotional experience
of their lives together? The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it
seemed.” The Mayo Foundation, in Minnesota, like the rest of the medical
establishment, thought that having fathers present was a bad idea, mostly
out of fear that “outsiders” would contaminate the sterile environment. But
Bradley persisted.
In 1962 he published Father’s Presence in Delivery Rooms, an
analysis of his first 4,000 cases when husbands were present throughout the
birth as coaches. “With husbands coaching, we have more than 90 per cent
totally unmedicated births. No other approach comes anywhere near that
figure.”Instead of morphine or scopolamine, Bradley mothers received PEP:
praise, encouragement and assurance of progress. They also had the baby’s
father at the foot of the bed, coaching them through their labour. When
Bradley died in 1998, aged 81, after presiding over nearly 20,000
unmedicated births, he was known as the father of fathers. He had helped
Western culture overturn thousands of years of tradition. In 18th-century
England, women were not allowed to see their husbands for the month-long
stay at a lying-in hospital. In Europe, men were rarely allowed into the
birth chamber.
If they were, it was only because the midwife needed the man’s strength to
hold the mother while she pushed, or to help to force out the baby. In
extreme circumstances, midwives instructed men to mount their wives in an
effort to lubricate and open the birth canal. Aristotle said that although
parents should avoid sex during pregnancy, they should have intercourse just
before the birth to “shake up the child and bring it out more easily”.
Guillemeau, a 17th-century French physician, revived the practice of sex
during labour. Yet sex often worked because sperm contains prostaglandin, a
hormone that helps the cervix to open.
As hospital births became common in the past century, men were removed even
farther from the process. They would drop their wives off at the admissions
desk and go back to work or back home to bed. They went to the pub, watched
cricket or tended the garden while the women cursed, cried, and contracted.
Sometimes, with nowhere else to go, they hung around hospital corridors for
news.
As hospital facilities expanded and modernised in America, expectant fathers
could be found sitting on the edge of a seat in the “stork club”, specially
designed waiting areas near the maternity ward where fathers could take off
their jackets, fret, smoke, talk on a pay phone, listen to the radio, and,
later, watch TV.
In 1953, Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York, began inviting fathers to
participate in prenatal classes, which included a demonstration on how to
give newborns a bath and lessons on preparing baby formula, “an important
part of baby care which some of the wives suggested as handy for their
husbands to learn”. Still, by 1961, only half of all fathers at Mount Sinai
were with their wives during labour, and none during delivery. Witnessing
birth was a new experience for a rather conservative generation of men and
many found it difficult. “Sometimes it looks like their hair is actually
standing up straight,” Mary Jane Sherritt, the hospital’s supervisor of
maternity, said.
In 1961, the year before men were allowed into British delivery rooms, the British
Medical Journal published a letter from a man saying fathers should have
a right to remain for births and that the “pathetic chain-smoking, restless,
and flower-offering expectant father should be a figure of the past”. Not
everyone agreed. Why would anyone want to see such a “disgusting miracle”?
In America, hospital resistance to the idea was fierce well into the
mid1960s. But as natural childbirth became more popular and more fathers
were needed to time contractions and to help their partners focus through
their pain, men began to challenge — and sometimes disregard — hospital
policy. In 1964, John O. Keim, a New Jersey father, was fined $150 for
gaining unauthorised entry to the delivery room to see the birth of his
second child. And John Quinn, a California college student, chained himself
to his wife while she was in labour to protest against the hospital’s ban on
his being in the room. The police were called. He made headlines.
By the early 1970s, however, most hospitals had changed their policies and
were permitting parents to stay together, with two exceptions: those who
weren’t married and those whose babies were born by Caesarean. Today, of
course, at least in most Western hospitals, the man standing next to the bed
does not need to be the woman’s husband or lover. He can be the sperm donor.
He can be one of two daddies about to adopt the child. Or perhaps he’s just
a friend. Indeed, once political gravity began drawing men into the birth
room, it did not matter who they were.
In 1960, a doctor toiling at Middlesex Hospital, West London, interviewed
fathers and their partners a couple of months after delivery. He asked the
men if they were happy to have been present during the birth. They said
“yes”, almost without exception. That doctor, George Davidson, then spoke to
them alone and assured them that the answers were confidential and that he
had no strong views. This time most of the men said that although the birth
was a remarkable experience, it was one they could have missed. Many felt it
did not improve their relationship with their wives, and some said they had
a hard time putting the birth image out of their mind during sex. Looking
back on that study, it sounds as if men, though willingly going into the
delivery room, were still uncomfortable there.
That study was long forgotten, pushed aside by the family-centred childbirth
movement that, in addition to bringing dads to the bedside, brought siblings
into the delivery room.
Then in the late 1990s, the water-birth pioneer Michel Odent did something
that seemed even more radical than advocating that babies be born in water.
He stayed out of the delivery room when his partner gave birth. Despite all
the babies he had caught, he did not want to distract his mate or spoil
their sexual relationship. Odent, who lives in England and runs his Primal
Health Research Centre in London, had interviewed couples years after their
babies had been born to investigate how the birthing event had shaped their
lives. He found that having the father there is not always best. In the
short term, Odent believes, men can hinder labour and may be contributing to
the soaring Caesarean rate. A father, distressed at seeing the woman in
pain, might try to talk to her. Such chatter, Odent says, forces the woman
to respond with the rational part of her brain, and that’s very distracting
for someone who needs to be in touch with her primitive self. In 2000, when
he was publicising his book, The Scientification of Love, he said
the anecdotal material was remarkable.
“The labour may be going slowly, slowly, and suddenly, for some unexpected
reason, the man has to go out [of the room]” he told one newspaper. “As soon
as he is gone, the woman starts to scream and shout, and when he comes back,
the baby has been born. I have many stories where the woman says,
“Everything was wonderful but unfortunately my husband was not there.” It is
as if women have two languages. They are convinced that they cannot give
birth without the participation of the baby’s father. But on the day of the
birth, they said something different with their body language.”
Sharing and caring
Sympathy symptoms
Today, psychologists believe that certain symptoms strongly reflect how highly
connected men are to their pregnant partners. In the early 1980s, doctors
began noticing that expectant fathers in Western cultures were increasingly
developing weight gain (10lb on average), fatigue, insomnia, indigestion,
insatiability, irritability, restlessness, and an urge to scrub the house.
With a culture that was demanding paternal participation from the moment the
pregnancy test revealed those two parallel lines confirming conception, it’s
possible that it wasn’t a matter of more men experiencing symptoms, they
were just more willing to admit that they, too, indulged in pickles and
ice-cream.
No one is sure exactly how many fathers exhibit symptoms. In 1982 researchers
reported that of the more than 200 fathers-to-be they studied in the New
York area, 22 per cent needed treatment for nausea, vomiting, cramps and
toothaches, symptoms that were not there before the pregnancy and
disappeared with the birth. Almost all of the sufferers were first-time
fathers. A 1985 study of 147 expectant fathers in the Milwaukee area found
90 per cent of the men had multiple symptoms, including insomnia, fatigue,
weight change and irritability.
Hormonal rollercoaster
Other studies have indicated that the phenomenon is not merely psychosomatic.
Blood and saliva samples from expectant dads show hormonal shifts that
reflect changes similar to the mother’s. Testosterone levels drop and
oestrogen levels rise. The stress hormone cortisol and the milk-inducing
hormone prolactin also increase in the weeks before birth as the men prepare
to become fathers. Some men say they even felt sick to the point of vomiting
after birth.
Simply in sync
But there are other explanations. For example, pregnant women don’t have room
for large meals, so they need to eat small portions, more frequently. Men
are likely to eat along with them but being able to eat larger portions,
they gain weight. In the last trimester, many women are too uncomfortable to
sleep, and the men are probably waking up as well. As for hormonal changes,
researchers say it’s synchronisation between two intimate people, just like
the phenomenon of women who are together every day menstruating at the same
time.
Labour pains for men
The Ainu men of Japan meditated on fatherhood for 12 days in seclusion, during
which they gave their soul to the child as the mother gave her body.
In New Guinea men were not allowed to see their wives from labour until one
month later, when a public feast introduced the baby to all, including its
father. After the feast, mother and child retreated — sans father — for a
year of seclusion.
There were, however, a few places where men were central to births. On Yap, a
tiny island in the South Pacific, the father was the normal birth attendant.
Among the Huichol tribe of Mexico, to make the father a partner in the
mother’s pain, a string would be tied around his testicles; the mother would
pull the tether as each contraction peaked.
Who wouldn’t want to witness something momentous? There are snapshots in my
head that will never go away. I’m also fairly sure I was useful. At that
particular time there was no one else in the world who could obey orders
about gas, air, cold flannels and energy tablets as efficiently as I could.
SIMON CROMPTON, 46
My wife had a planned Caesarean. A screen was put up between me, her head
and the rest of her body. After a few squelchy noises and a long pause,
little Billy was lifted over the barrier, squealing like a piglet. As I
headed towards the midwife cleaning my son I couldn’t help but look over the
screen to see my wife, lying in a pool of blood, while her stomach flesh was
being sewn together. That image has stayed with me.
JAMES CLARKE, 41
I think fathers who don’t attend the birth are missing out. I was on a real
high afterwards; it’s an amazing, humbling experience.
MIKE KRAGE, 43
