The NHS does not have bottomless pockets. Private rooms for all are not going to be happening any time soon so the hospitals have to work with what they have.
When what they have is less than ideal, all they can do is to try to predict and prevent the worst problems that they can see arising and apply an appropriate policy.
However nice it would be to think that all men who have just become fathers are far too enthralled with their own lovely baby to indulge in any of the behaviours mentioned here, that unfortunately simpy isn't the case. I have dealt with an awful lot of clients who have become fathers, often at a very young age, and have blithely carried on being exactly the same vile, self-centred little twerps that they were before. I have personally seen some of these young men verbally abusing their heavily pregnant, or new-mum girlfriends, or swearing at and threatening their crying babies. I have seen young babies in the waiting areas of magistrates' courts with parents at each other's throats. I have read accounts of domestic abuse where verbal abuse and threats were made immediately after the birth of a baby.
Most hospitals will have a huge mix of clientele and some of these men will be the partners of the women on any post-natal ward that anyone on this thread might visit. They will not be considerate. They will tell you to fuck off if you ask them not to look through the curtains. They will phone their mates and talk loudly. They will tell their girlfriends they are fat a couple of hours after giving birth and mock them when they cry. They will bring beer into the ward. Not everyone on a post-natal ward has a partner who is a Nice Bloke. My NCT group were nearly all using the same hospital - we didn't - and they were told to take a padlock for their bedside locker as otherwise their phones and cameras WOULD be stolen by other visitors of other patients - this was a common enough occurence that it was just accepted.
These men are the hospital staff's worse-case scenario and these are the men that mean that a blanket ban is needed. It is simply not appropriate to run the risk of vulnerable, post-partum women being exposed to their behaviour.
Unfortunately that means that the nice, supportive, helpful majority have to be banned too, but that is part of living in a society of people with mixed standards of behaviour - laws and rules and policies cater for those who want to do the crap stuff, not for those who can be trusted to behave.
I can't imagine anything more horrific than being stuck, post c-section perhaps, on a post-natal ward with a couple of my clients. I can't imagine anything more frightening or distressing than lying in bed on the other side of a flimsy curtain, listening to one of them threatening to come in and "fucking nut that baby if she doesn't shut it up" - something I heard someone say in court about another woman's baby.
Yes, post-natal care needs some serious looking-at and that would be money well-spent. But not provision for overnight visitors on a ward full of bleeding, hormonal, shell-shocked new mums. Please no.