Just a generation after fathers had to beg or even sue for the right to be present, the door to the delivery room has swung wide open. Even the most traditional hospitals now allow multiple guests during labor, transforming birth from a private affair into one that requires a guest list.
Like bridesmaids and pallbearers, the invitees are marked as an honored group of intimates. But few weddings or funerals involve nudity, blood or heavy anesthetics.
“I’ve always been really close to my dad, but I don’t think he’d seen me without my clothes on since I was 13,” said Kate Bickert, who nonetheless asked her father and six others to her first delivery.
The staff at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco not only permitted the group but also offered it a large room packed with extra chairs, Bickert said.
When Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, among the busiest birthing facilities in the country, moves into its new home in 2007, each labor and delivery room will have its own spectator section: an area near the head of the mother’s bed, called the family zone, equipped with seating for four.
Though most hospitals allow only a few guests at a time, some have abandoned limits altogether. When a patient at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., recently went into early labor, she simply relocated her baby shower – guests, presents, cake and all – to her delivery room.
“You can have two family members disrupt everything that’s going on, but you can have 15 who are well behaved, and it’s no problem at all,” said Dr. Andrew Ross, an obstetrician in the Denver area.
The newly inclusive approach – despite some awkward and unintended consequences – is a triumph both for hospitals, which have made birth remarkably safe for mother and child, and for the natural childbirth movement, which has long campaigned for more humanized care.
But those are not the only reasons behind the change. Families now come in too many configurations for hospitals to dictate who accompanies the mother.
There may also be financial rewards for hospitals.
Childbirth, the most consistently happy event to take place within their walls, can be an alluring marketing tool, especially when an audience is involved.
“The more family-friendly a hospital can be during labor and delivery, the more comfortable a family will be coming there for an angioplasty,” Ross said.