The premise of your question bothered me so much, I felt compelled to write my first ever Quora answer in 5 years on the site. There are some great, rational, emotional answers already so I’ll just address my issue with it head-on:
If you're willing to miss your child's birth over some feminist conspiracy theory, you shouldn’t be a father… and you might just be less of a ‘man’, too.
Now, there may be good reasons a father physically can't be in the room but that's not your question. You're asking whether it's "okay to choose not to witness” your child's birth (I know you didn’t say ‘your’ child, but from here on I’m going to address it as such because it’s less awkward than constantly referring to a hypothetical third-party father).
To answer, I'm going to lay out three reasons the answer is emphatically NO, and moreover why you should want to be in there.
- Pregnancy is hard. Being there to at least share the emotional rollercoaster of the climax is the least you can do.
Seriously, have you seen what a woman goes through to carry a child?! Her organs squish up under the rib cage to make space. Her brain rewires itself, and her body develops virtually superhuman capabilities to make extra blood cells and nutrients. She literally sacrifices her own physiological needs to grow and support this other life. That - is crazy! Not to mention carrying a 30+ pound load for months on end, with all the associated pains.
Even getting pregnant can be hard. For us, it took years of trying, with multiple losses, each more heartbreaking than the last. My wife was told she might never have kids, and we'd all but given up by the time we found out we were pregnant again. Then she had to inject herself in the stomach throughout the pregnancy, with medicine that burned and left painful bruises on her skin. Twice a day, every day. For 9 months. I don't know if I could've gone through that, or myriad other discomforts she endured.
Sure, that's not the norm. Some women go through even worse. Others just have a roll in the hay, pee on a stick and a baby pops out 9 months later. But even for them, pregnancy puts an incredible strain on the body and mind. There's no such thing as an 'easy' pregnancy.
What kind of man could watch someone go through so much, and not at least show up to help at the end? If you knew your buddy had shoved a couch up 9 flights of stairs but could be there to help with the 10th, would you hide on the 8th floor waiting for him to finish instead of ‘the norm’ of at least offering to help? What if the couch was half yours, too? - There is a very real chance that your wife, or child, or both will die.
Childbirth is a major medical procedure with risks that increase exponentially with even the slightest complication. Every day, 830 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and 2,740 infants per day die on the same day they're born. And sure, those deaths are largely in third-world countries but it's worth pointing out the US ranks an appalling 49th in maternal mortality and 69th in infant mortality.* Add in any one of many individual health issues that can affect any woman, and the risk factors pile up pretty quickly.
My wife had a few of those issues and was deemed a ‘high-risk’ pregnancy. For one, the aforementioned injections were blood thinners for Factor V Leiden, a serious (yet common) blood-clotting disorder only discovered after our last miscarriage.
Moments after our daughter was born—just after I'd met her, counted fingers & toes, and cut the umbilical cord—I left her with the nurses cleaning her up, so I could get back to my wife's side. She was beaming, happier and more beautiful than I’d ever seen her.
But…
She was fading out, tired and weak. The doctors told me to keep her talking, to make sure she didn't fall asleep. So I told her all about our perfectly healthy baby, told her what the nurses were doing with her, made her laugh.
Then the nurses handed the little bundle over to me, and I got to hold her up to show my wife, and remind her she'd get to hold her too! For the first time! Any minute now! If you just stay awake a bit longer…
All while the doctors strapped down her arms, and frantically rushed to stitch her back up. Because she was losing too much blood, too quickly.
All while she told me her eyes felt heavy and she needed a nap. With a smile on her face, and blood/fluids literally pooling around the operating table, under my feet…
It was serious, for just a few minutes, but turned out fine. It almost certainly would have turned out fine even if I hadn't been there. One of the nurses would've kept her talking, and because the doctors were good at their jobs, my wife was awake and holding our daughter shortly after. But the margins of error are razor thin in moments like that.
Would a stranger know the best ways to keep her distracted/calm/alert when things went south? Or might the person who should know her best—her partner—be better equipped to help in whatever way the doctors may ask?
These could be the last minutes of your partner's life or the only minutes of your child's. Do you really want to pass them off to an underpaid nurse she just met? Or risk missing them entirely in the time it takes for someone to find you, explain what’s happening, get you scrubbed up?
It’s your right as a man to choose to be down the hall while all that's going on. You can sit in an uncomfortable chair, play on your phone or whatever, and wait for someone with blood spattered scrubs to come give you the news, good or bad.
But if the mother wants you in there, the doctors allow it and it comes down to your ‘choice’, the only reason I can think you’d decide not to is that you're too damn weak or irresponsible to handle the real stuff as it happens, in that room.
Back to the question: did I ‘need’ to be there? If my wife had gone to sleep and not woken up, I wouldn’t have been able to prevent it. But her family would have been by her side.
Later, when the enormity of those sleepy moments really hit us for the first time, she told me they were the happiest of her life, and if they'd been her last she would've been okay with that. After countless even happier moments with our daughter since we're all quite glad they weren't.- In case neither of those things persuaded you, I saved the best for last. And don't worry, it's nothing beta like ‘being there to support your partner’ or ‘taking responsibility’. In fact, it's pretty selfish.
You should want to be in the room for the birth of your child because it's truly amazing.
40-odd weeks before, you had a pretty good day, you got laid, and that turned into LIFE. Now you get to be there to see an actual miracle, in person! And I don't mean miracle in the religious sense: I mean "how - is this even possible?" It’s better than any movie, sports game, concert or anything you’ve ever seen. Is ‘yeah, that movie was great!’ a substitute for watching it yourself? Would you just sit outside the stadium and wait for someone to tell you the score?
I will never, ever forget the moment my daughter arrived. She's literally a part of me. She'll be part of me until the day I die. And I felt fortunate to be at every scan, appointment, and checkup. To be there from the beginning of her life. To hear her very first breath.
If anything, the 'old-fashioned' way, where men just waited outside, deprived us of being part of something incredible.
Being in the delivery room isn't about need or obligation, and it's not borne out of feminism or political correctness or anything like that.
It's a wonderful privilege.
I'll close with part of my daughter's birthday that meant very little in the grand scheme of things but is relevant here. Just beforehand, they took my wife back into the operating room to prep her for surgery and asked me to wait outside in the hall. I sat there staring at this:
It was only about ten minutes, maybe less. But they felt like the longest of my life as a million thoughts ran through my head. Our whole world was about to change… Probably in an incredible, awesome way, but don't forget the risks... My wife was through those doors, in a cold, bright room, getting prodded and poked. Strong as hell—stronger than me—but scared too. And alone right now… Would she have a bad reaction to anesthetic like when she was younger? Would there be more complications? What if I have to raise this baby alone? Our daughter had made it this far, further than the ones we lost... against the odds! But would she make it through this last bit? Would she be healthy? What if, what if, what if…
And there I was stuck outside, staring at that wall. I took that picture to remind me how awful those ten minutes felt. Waiting outside, you’re powerless to do anything. Powerless to help in any way, no matter how small. You’re useless. You’re weak.
A father has to be strong, especially for a daughter who will have a much harder life simply because a large part of the world still thinks treating women as ‘less-than’ should be ‘the norm’.
A father has to be willing to support his partner in whatever ways he can. Especially while men in distant cities pass laws, cut budgets, and dictate what she is allowed to do with her body, increasing the risks to both mother and child.
So, should a father be in the delivery room? YES, if he’s permitted and physically able.
Not because of feminism, but because if he isn’t up to the responsibilities, can’t handle the realities—or would choose not to do either, just to prove a point—then he’s not man enough to be a father in the first place.
Edits: This question got under my skin, as it obviously has many others. I never expected my little rant to get so many views (thank you!) but since it has, I figured I should fix a few little grammar niggles and add a few more pertinent details… necessary since I wrote the original one-handed on my phone while holding a sleeping baby. At least it kept me occupied during an unusually long nap!
*Sources for mortality rates: World Health Organization, CIA World Factbook, Save the Children. (Found with a quick Google search so if anyone has better numbers/sources please feel free to suggest edits!)
topic/Pregnancy
https://www.quora.com/topic/Pregnancy
