Visitors on post-natal wards - a feminist issue?

[JellySlice]

I have read so many threads posted by mums in post-natal wards where partners are allowed to stay overnight and excessive numbers of poorly-behaved visitors are allowed. The level of noise becomes disruptive, the lack of privacy is distressing and ridiculous demands are made of the midwives and auxiliaries.

Yet nobody is able to say or do anything about it. The midwives seem powerless to impose a standard of behaviour upon the visitors, or to evict those who abuse it. The mothers are reluctant to complain because they are sympathetic to the other women's need for companionship/love/help, but also why should they have to?

The reason I wonder whether this is a feminist issue is that the people suffering in this situation and struggling to take control of this situation are female (predominately female, in the case of the midwives).

Is 'Be Kind' socialisation backfiring on women again?

How can this be changed?

Sorry. If a mother declares herself unable to advocate for her baby was what I meant.

It is a respect for other people problem and a lack of boundaries being enforced problem, which is linked to underfunded, overworked, midwives working in a poor culture.

But however unpalatable it is, many if not most women are not relaxed in the presence of male strangers, and are not happy to be intimately touched, have intimate conversations, be in a state of undress or be carrying catheter bags and leaking fluids in front of a male stranger, regardless of how lovely he may be if you get to know him. And it isn't one male stranger, it's potentially a room full of them, at a time when that woman needs to be able to rest and feel safe for her own recovery and the good of her baby.

I was re reading Gill Sim's wonderful book 'Why Mummy doesn't give a ' the other day, and she mentions the subconscious reaction when her son's voice breaks and for a few days she keeps hearing a strange man's voice in the house. She's programmed to alert for it, there are reasons. There's a limit to how much it is reasonable to ask women to try and consciously override this for social reasons to benefit other people.

For example, people on mental health wards are vulnerable people who need an advocate, but we don’t routinely have a family member sleeping next to their hospital bed each night, for a whole host of reasons that also apply to maternity wards.

I'm still of the view that the answer is single rooms. Maternity hospitals here are almost all single rooms, there are cots available for the fathers if they want to stay. And since the meals are to order, fathers can order their own and pay for them.

NICUs also have family rooms for mothers and fathers to stay with their babies as much as possible.

And yet you have hospitals being built with all private room except maternity care. So the whole 'the curtains need to be open' doesn't apply because in other units care is having to be provided with people in private rooms. Wards are outdated, intrusive and counter-productive because times have moved on and people should be accorded privacy and dignity in addition to proper care. That can't happen on a ward (ICU excepted but that's extreme case, thankfully, and visitors are much more restricted in there).

I think this is definitely a feminist issue. I can’t imagine the standard of care being so poor if men experienced it.

The issue with partners staying over is it make some women uncomfortable. After birth you are incredibly vulnerable a male stranger is hardly going to put you at ease. Then remember that 86,000 women are raped or sexually assaulted in the Uk every year. The chances of a women on the ward having to deal with vulnerability and past trauma are huge.

For a practical point of view a ward becomes hotter, noisier and crowded with essentially triple capacity if men are allowed to stay.

I have no issue with men in private rooms but women deserve dignity and privacy after childbirth so surely wards should remain single sex.

Post natal wards should just be made up of private rooms. It would solve so many issues around privacy, partners staying and more.

There is the part of it that is by now oh so familiar: women should sacrifice normal, regulated, legislated and compulsory privacy, dignity, consent and bodily autonomy, even when this is distressing and against their will, when this is inconvenient to the presence of males.

In other words, females may have bodily privacy, consent, personal boundaries on what intimacy they're prepared to have with strangers -

but only if this is gifted to them by males, or people wishing to bring males into the situation. Even though it's law.

Ah bless Jurgen it’s all about you isn’t it.

Erm, no. It wasn't. It was about me leaving at an appropriate time, to give women what almost everyone in this thread wants women to have - a ward to themselves. And still, people like you Barbarella1, have to have a whine about something that I never even said. Do you even read posts, or just make assumptions? Lets find out shall we...

For me, it's not an 'entitled fathers' issue or 'men versus women' issue, it's just a 'respect for patients' issue - patients need to be able to rest, which means that visiting hours need to be strictly limited, no matter whether it's your mum or your husband or your daughter visiting. And these visiting hours need to be enforced.

This is interesting in itself, as well as other examples of bad behaviour on wards or in hospitals generally. There was a time when there would have been no argument with a nurse in charge about inappropriate behaviour. This has in part broken down because people thought that it caused to much authoritarianism. But there is a trade off with losing that.

even when this is distressing and against their will, when this is inconvenient to the presence of males.

This is the kind of comment that makes me a little angry. It is not about men being demanding. Yes, there are demanding men out there. But most of us can see there is more than one consideration here. Men began to be admitted to births and to stay because women wanted it, and still want it, as much as men did. And it is not odd that men, who are new parents, should want to be with their infants. That's not something that it is unreasonable for us to recognise, even if it doesn't "centre women".

We should be able to talk about the problems that arise from these situations, the difficulty in accommodating people's different needs, without implying that it's about men being selfish.

Why are women being asked to sacrifice their feelings of dignity, privacy and safety, if not to permit men into the space?

There's evidence on this thread and every thread that the benefits of males being present - and not just visiting, through the night, round the clock in the same room - should outweigh those women wanting those things.

I don’t think breastfeeding support is medical care unless the baby has lost a significant amount of weight and is therefore needing assistance with feeding.

Breastfeeding used to be a socially learnt skill, and as a society we have undermined it through normalising formula feeding and hidden it through both the shaming and sexualisation of women’s bodies. I personally believe peer support is the most valuable resource for successful breastfeeding and hope that in the future this is valued and more accessible.

If you solved the breastfeeding ‘issue’ with more community midwifes and peer support groups then a lot of that care could be provided at home and community centres. Home births should also be pushed for low risk women and early discharges from hospital. If this all happened then you would hopefully only be left with women staying overnight in hospital because of major abdominal surgery, unwell babies and unwell mums (pre-eclampsia, sepsis etc). And I maintain that in those cases open bays are the safest option for those patients.

Did men start to stay on wards because most women wanted it?

@EuroMillionsWinner the maternity hospital in Glasgow was not renovated along with the main QEUH. It was done up about ten years ago when the maternity at the Queen Mother’s closed.
All the maternity hospitals in Glasgow seem to have the same layout in the four bed bays with barely any room for visitors during the day let alone overnight

Home births should also be pushed for low risk women and early discharges from hospital. If this all happened then you would hopefully only be left with women staying overnight in hospital because of major abdominal surgery, unwell babies and unwell mums (pre-eclampsia, sepsis etc). And I maintain that in those cases open bays are the safest option for those patients.

I thought this was the way things were going. Women no longer stay for 5 days like when I had DS1 27 years ago. Then, I was ill with blood loss and the nursery nurses picked DS up for me (I was told to ask for help having fainted twice) and the other mothers got stuff out my locker for me and gave me lots of support and company. When my DTs were born and in SCBU, an ante-natal mum came and talked to me and I helped here when her DD was in SCBU.

Not all mothers have a man to come and help, and many will not be on their first child and the father will be needed at home. Then there are those who need to be away from men. There needs to be space for them separate from the needs of the couples.

Pushing women into a place of birth where the most effective form of pain relief won't be available is inexcusable. I'm all for the right to home birth and it's a perfectly legitimate choice for those who want it, but trying to push it isn't feminist.

I think you take my ‘push’ to mean on an independent level. I mean as a society. There is still huge suspicion and ridicule of homebirths as ‘hippy’ ‘dirty’ and ‘dangerous’. They do need to be pushed to be seen as a legitimate and safe choice for women. For low risk women having their 2nd, 3rd etc babies a home birth is the safest place for them to give birth. When you discuss home birth with women the lack of epidural is not what comes up. Instead you hear ‘my partner is worried about the mess’ ‘my mum doesn’t think it’s safe. No one would forgive me if something went wrong’. That’s concerning because it shows a widespread lack of societal understanding about what a home birth entails and facts about its safety.

Well access to epidural was definitely what came up for me with my 3rd. At any rate, the other issue was that the nearest CLU was FAR and increasingly is so for many women as services are centralised and smaller units closed down.

And again, the open curtains ward can't work with the visiting hours that are the norm now because people don't want to be all out in the open, even when ill after giving birth. It's a paradigm that's a thing of the past. Wanting privacy isn't anti-social, necessarily, it's about increasing awareness that being ill does not preclude the need for privacy and dignity.

Society has moved on from this idea that you have to be all out even if makes you uncomfortable or is against your religious beliefs.

It's unworkable.

If you mean demystify and legitimise homebirth, then let's use those terms rather than talk about pushing a place of birth. They're not the same thing and we shouldn't look to push anything, we should provide accurate information and facilitate informed choice. Anything else is completely inappropriate. This means discussion of safety stats, and availability of pain relief regardless of whether individual women you might have come across raised either as an issue. Women need all of that.

Home births are definitely not safer than hospitals. If emergency intervention is needed then the hospital is an ambulance ride away which could mean life or death. If women want a home birth then great but it should never be pushed on them.

www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/birthplace

Please do read this. It was a huge study and informs current NICE guidelines on the counselling of women on place of birth. For low risk women having their 2nd, 3rd + babies giving birth at home has no difference in outcome for mum and baby, but does see reduced rates of caesarean and instrumental deliveries.

I stand by my use of the word ‘push’. Change does not come about from leaflets tucked into the back of maternity notes. That doesn’t mean we use guilt or coercion to sway women’s choices, it means we clearly state facts in the hope that women feel empowered to make informed choices, not the choices of their husbands or mothers. That is how any public health campaign works - posters, adverts on the telly, antenatal talks etc.

This has gone off topic - but I do think the safe movement of women away from the hospital setting who do not have a medical need to be in hospital would ease the pressure on postnatal wards and redefine them as a place for unwell mothers and babies.

@Nameofchanges the baby is also a patient. They do a series of tests on the baby to check s/he is fine so you both get discharged.

On the postnatal ward I was put on all the babies were ill apart from mine. Also 3 of the other 5 women were also needing extra medical attention.

All the staff did was tell us when to get food but told us we needed to get it ourselves. They also told you were you could make up bottles for the baby if you had to supplement their feed/could not breast feed.

It was left to dads and grandmothers to make up the bottles as the 3 women whose babies needed extra feeds couldn't walk to the bottle making room to do so.

My DP and some of the other men were upset to see one woman as she was told to walk when you could see she had a very traumatic c-section. She and her baby were disturbed every 90 minutes by a doctor and/or midwife for the 2 days I was kept in. They also kept drawing back her curtains. This probably ensured all the other men behaved, and another mother whose older kid of about 3 who came to visit with her father made them both leave within 2 hours.

There was actually only one annoying couple and it was the woman who was annoying as she prevented the father from doing his instinct, which was to pick up their baby when she cried. It took 2 midwives and a doctor to tell her that when the baby cried they needed to comfort her. Even when she was told that she had a go at him because while she was fine their baby was ill.

Cola, this may be recent then. I have older children and at that time babies were not registered as patients.

If it takes two midwives and a doctor to convince a couple to agree to either them of them picking up a crying ill baby, that’s a serious care issue. The mother in that situation clearly is clearly not fine, and it requires medical or social services involvement.