Join Your Lady In A Labour-Ward!
- Category: Gender
- Date 12-03-2006
- 464 views
Women who undergo childbirths tell of indescribable levels of pain they experience inside the labour ward, while delivering a child. Some say that the moment of labour amounts to a near-death incident! Women who experience it have principally boasted of their supreme endurance, but a man could today witness the tale of agony undergone by their wives by escorting their women into the delivery room.
When I used to stay at home, women in my village would (and perhaps still do) gather around a woman in labour, supporting her to bring forth a new baby. They would nevertheless turn away any man from the delivering event, even the woman’s own husband! Until she had been fully calmed and cleaned, along with her baby, no man whatsoever would be allowed to come close to congratulate her.
Subsequently, husbands found an excuse to run up and down pursuing nothing in particular, if only to show that they too are labouring to support the childbirth. Nowadays, townsfolk prefer to stand outside the ward, occasionally jumping into the car and driving away, to return shortly with say, a congratulation card – since they are basically barred from the labour ward.
Above all, the child’s father has to wait to be told of his wife’s experience at delivery, plus learning second-hand what child has been born. A midwife emerges from the room to declare, “it is a baby-girl or baby-boy”, before the husband dispatches numerous phone texts to friends and relatives, announcing the glad news.
This is very unfair. It is cowardly of men to run away whenever literal childbearing is mentioned: husbands should be more proactive. Some fathers-to-be have been cited waiting at a nearby pub when their women are inside the hospital labour-ward. At some point certainly, the delivering mother would be in a coma and unable to know the goings-on; your child might even be stolen.
A father should essentially see it as a duty to be inside the delivery room at the time of a child’s birth, to witness the golden moment. It should be your right to see your own child being born. To watch firsthand the entire chapter, to personally cut the cord, to hold your child before anyone else! What a memorable experience it must be!
In the western world, some parents consider it a great misfortune for a man to miss such a great event, which enables you to tell your children in future about the first moments when you held them and how emotional it was.
In England as in America, it would be deemed brutal for a man not to be by his wife’s bedside to care and share the labour pains. According to Britain’s National Childbirth Trust, partners accompany more than ninety percent (90%) of the women giving birth. In some cases, about a dozen people, close friends and family members, would turn up – the line-up of relations and supportive friends wanting to be in the delivery room is thus increasingly becoming an issue of great concern, as it has given rise to "labour room parties" which in turn inconvenience the medical staff.
It has been proposed that being at the birth is a good thing: it sets a pattern for fathers to remain involved through children's lives. It helps them to appreciate the beauty of childbirth and prepares a man to cooperate fairly with his partner in looking after children. It generates a sense of emotional attachment.
It is fulfilling to have a baby and also an opportunity to be the first to counsel your wife through her difficult time of labour! Absence of husbands from the ward leaves many men unaware that the wife was in a life or death situation. Experts warn that men need to be counselled about the sights and sounds to expect during labour as some men would collapse, watching their women going through intense pain – would you collapse?
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen