I don’t think I would have managed a mask during labour. I vomited very suddenly several times and the whole labour was very fast and painful. I didn’t have much control of myself at the end and would probably have torn it off. I feel quite faint after wearing a mask for an hour or so while carrying my baby so can only imagine how much worse it would be in labour. While masks may not be dangerous per se they would make labour much more uncomfortable and stressful which probably increases the risk of interventions which otherwise wouldn’t have been required so you are compromising women’s care and potentially their long term health for the sake of a tiny reduction in risk to medical staff (and I can’t imagine that me wearing a mask would have helped at all given all the vomiting). This policy subjects women who mostly don’t have coronavirus to an unnecessarily awful birth experience.
What’s really inhumane about it is that women are essentially forced. I would happily take the risk of giving birth at home rather than wearing a mask if it was just me but wouldn’t want to risk my baby not having medical care so would have had to try to wear one if this had been the policy.
I think the world has completely lost perspective here. Since when did medical staff refuse to treat people because they have a tiny chance of having an illness which is mostly very mild, particularly to people of working age. And insisting that a woman vomits into a mask while in intense pain is barbaric - as someone who gave birth recently this sounds close to torture.