If you’re looking for Dad, he’s behind the bush

Rachel Johnson says that fathers can be useful stand-in midwives during childbirth — but pours scorn on David Cameron’s celebration of this ‘magic moment’ As if to rebut unfair charges that he is short on ideas, our leader broke his six-month silence this week to announce a hard-edged new policy. In a radical announcement to the National Family and Parenting Institute, David Cameron exclusively recommended — as part of a policy review on ‘the couple relationship’ — that fathers should be present at the ‘magic moment’ of their child’s birth (or as members of the Countryside Alliance put it, ‘in at the kill’).

Childbirth, he reveals, in his best spokesman-from-Relate fashion, can be a key bonding moment or a ‘missed opportunity which leaves a couple drifting apart’. I have two comments. No, make that three.

One, this policy is older than he is. In the 1940s, Dr Fernand Lamaze, influenced by Soviet childbirth practices, taught natural childbirth techniques in preference to medical interventions. Gravid women were taught how to breathe, use birthing balls and hot and cold packs, and even to orgasm in order to hasten labour.

At least two years before the arrival of little David William Donald Cameron in Oxfordshire, a book called The New Childbirth was published. In her book Erna Wright SRN SCM includes two long chapters on the important role of men in childbirth. In ‘The Necessary Father’ she writes that the participation of fathers in the birth of their children was important and yes, bonding, and had ‘never happened before in any society, ancient or modern, eastern or western’ and that the development marked a ‘new and rather surprising cultural trend’.

In the following chapter, called ‘Man’s Work is Never Done’, Mrs Wright briskly sets out the role of the father through every stage in the process. ‘I shall teach you, as a husband, to be a sort of plumber’s mate to your wife in the job she has to do,’ she writes, using a decidedly apt turn of phrase. So it’s all been jolly modern and forward-thinking and groovy-dad-oriented in the delivery room for, oh, at least 40 years now.

My second comment is this. David Cameron has slightly missed one of the main points of fathers being present at what he no doubt calls the ‘empowering birth experience’. The way he talks, it’s all about bonding and sharing and magic moments. Now, I am the last person to deny that all this is theoretically possible in an NHS delivery suite. The birth of a child (even one’s own) is an event that reduces most human beings to hot tears of wonder and most mothers I know (including me) remember the births of their children as the most rapturous moments of their entire lives.

But to be honest, it is not the presence of the father that makes it so. In the second or third stages of labour, two rugby teams could be having a stag party right by your bed, and a labouring female wouldn’t notice a thing. She is a naked, screaming, swearing animal in the involuntary grip of the fiercest urge in Nature. The male instinctively knows this.

This explains why, in less politically correct societies, men don’t participate in the birth of their children, not even to establish the important male principle that for the rest of their union, she will do all the work while he loiters around helplessly.

No — they scarper.

In one West African region, the woman tells her husband when she’s in labour. This is the signal for him not to find the whale music and glucose power bars and Evian facial mist, as it is here. It’s the signal for him to run and hide in a bush, safely out of earshot. He sits under this bush until his mother-in-law brings a bundle in a cloth to him, at which point he goes home and graciously accepts congratulations.

And in a part of Mexico inhabited by Indians, the man’s role is even more heroic. The woman in labour makes her way to a hut outside the village, to do her stuff. Meanwhile, her husband heads to the mid dle of the village square, where he publicly and dramatically enacts his wife’s confinement, while his every need is attended to by unmarried maidens of the village.

Don’t laugh; this is father participation at its purest. According to psychologists who have studied the easy labours experienced by these Mexican village womenfolk, this ritual teaches mothers to be behave sensibly, as all the emotional histrionics of suffering are embodied by the fathers.

But here in Britain, most of us give birth in large teaching hospitals, not in huts or indeed in private hospitals. Of course, most deliveries are safe and successful. But there are still 24 maternal deaths per 100,000 births in Europe (that ratio leaps to 830 per 100,000 births in Africa).

And this is where men actually come in. In this country, there is (in case you haven’t noticed, Dave) a chronic shortage of midwives, with 5,000 having left the profession over the last decade. According to one study of maternity wards in the north west, babies and mothers are at constant risk of what the health professionals euphemistically call ‘adverse events’ or ‘near misses’ during childbirth. Babies go into foetal distress; Caesarean sections are performed too late; mothers are unattended, simply because there are no midwives or ob-gynae doctors to hand.

So while of course it’s lovely having a man there to share in the magic moment of birth, it’s even more lovely having a man there in order for him to spare the child’s life. Somehow, it’s been forgotten in this careysharey-Blairy universe we all live in that childbirth is the most dangerous part of life, and that too many babies die unnecessarily because of what the perinatal experts call ‘intrapartum fetal compromise resulting from insufficient training’ — which is the technical term, I suspect, for ‘crap care’.

During my three births, my husband monitored the baby’s heartbeat with grim determination throughout each of my 36, 18, and two-hour labours at St Mary’s, Paddington. When he thought things didn’t look right, he would leave the room (where we were mostly alone), find a person in a white coat, and bodily drag them in. His actions definitely saved the life of his daughter — who was in a presentation called ‘face/brow’ — and possibly his wife, too.

And my third comment is this. Apparently, David Cameron doesn’t want ‘to force fathers into the delivery room’. But the implication here is that all dutiful fathers, like David Cameron and David Beckham — held up as poster dads for our approval by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Father’s Day — would not dream of being anywhere else.

I’m all for fathers being there, for mainly medical reasons, as I said. But all this guff about superdads and magic moments leaves me edgy. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised, after all this, if pacing the hospital corridor for hours as the woman shrieks and howls — even crouching under bushes — didn’t make a surprise comeback.