I wouldn't have wanted other people's partners on the wards all night either.
I had a very complicated pregnancy, long labour and difficult birth with DS. I had been pregnant three times in quick succession, had a stillborn boy and a premature girl who died before having a healthy DS.
All my pregnancies have been complicated, distressing and frightening and have required many, many scans, interventions, operations, cervical stitches, examinations, injections, tests, samples of everything to be taken and tested. You name it, I think someone somewhere did it to me while I was pregnant at one point or another.
I felt like public property and would go into my appointments dreading the moment when someone ushered in some students or asked for a second opinion and uttered the words "...and bring the anglepoise" as they were doing it. I felt like every man and his dog had seen me naked or half naked, or ill and weeping and vulnerable and bleeding.
So by the time DS was born the last thing I needed was for various strangers to be there to witness the after effects of his birth. I didn't even want DH to see me and I felt like I had been violently assaulted rather than given birth to a baby.
I was put on a shared ward with three other women in similar states to me, long, long labour, forceps and episiotomy leaving me unable to walk properly for days and bleeding heavily for six weeks.
I didn't want those women to see me and they were in the same state. Let alone their partners or visitors being there all day and night as well. Visiting hours were already 8am-8pm and there was no toilet in our room, so each time I left it, which was often because I needed to change my hideous paper pants and giant maternity towel every single hour, I ran the risk of meeting people from other rooms too.
My bed was in the corner by the sink, so the other women and their visitors were pushing past my bed all the time to get water to drink or for flowers or to rinse cups or make juice or get washed and brush teeth. The other women kept their curtains closed most of the time, so random people would just appear at my bedside through the curtains and surprise me, either trying to find the sink or looking for the person they wanted to visit. Even at night the nurses were always needing to get past the bed to get to the supply cupboard so I had no privacy even with my curtains closed.
One woman's husband threatened a doctor who accidentally knocked over her juice jug through the closed curtain as he spoke to another patient. I was trying to breastfeed DS, was alone at the time and terrified that he would attack the doctor and come crashing through the curtain and onto us. I couldn't move quickly enough to get away and would have had to climb over the bed to get away without passing him. I was scared.
It took me weeks to get enough confidence back to even get changed in the same room as DH, I felt totally battered and violated and I needed privacy more than anything else, even at home.
So dealing with all of that, in a room full of strangers, was hard. Even at night, when it was just the four of us and four babies and a few random nurses wandering in and out at least once an hour through the entire night to poke or prod at someone and deliver a bottle or a spare nappy or a clean blanket or something to someone for their baby. Four more people there through the night, male or female, even if one of them was my DH, would have been four too many for me.