NEW YORK (AP) – Pregnancy, birth and life with a newborn in the midst of a pandemic have created high anxiety, ever-changing hospital protocols and intense isolation for many of the millions of women who have done it around the world.
As the pandemic stretches into a second year and economic concerns persist, demographers are studying the reasons for an expected pandemic baby crisis. Women, meanwhile, have learned to work in masks and introduce new arrivals to loved ones through windows.
Fear, anxiety and chaos were particularly acute in New York City during the first months of the pandemic in what was one of the country’s most devastating hot spots.
Whitnee Hawthorne gave birth to her second son on May 7 in a hospital in New York. Ten months later, her baby has yet to meet his paternal grandparents, who live in Louisiana.
“Our first son met them in the second week of his life,” said Hawthorne, whose husband was happily by her side after a ban on birth partners was lifted at their hospital several weeks before her time in labor.
As a black woman, she said, she had decided she would leave the state instead of giving birth on her own.
“I am well aware of the high maternal death rates for black women and also, having a negative experience with a nurse during my first delivery, I was afraid,” Hawthorne said.
Like Hawthorne, Nneoma Maduike was masked when she gave birth to her second child, a son, on August 1, after a pregnancy full of strangers.
“The fear was absolutely dire. Information evolved as quickly as you can imagine, ”said Maduike, who lives in Brooklyn. ‘I didn’t know which guidelines to follow. My husband is a doctor and he still went in every day and that caused even more anxiety. “
Twenty-four hours after a Caesarean section, Maduike was allowed to go home. Hospitals at the time tried to protect new mothers and babies from the virus by delaying them early, which also reduced the burden on skeletal workers.
While her husband was present for the delivery, neither knew the hospital would require their newborn to remain in Maduike’s room as a precautionary measure rather than the nursery. Her husband went home to be with their older child and left her to care for the baby on her own shortly after surgery. Then it was a struggle to get her husband back to the hospital over safety concerns.
In contrast to her first delivery, there were of course no visitors. Friends were not allowed to visit the hospital with balloons, flowers and food. Maduike’s mother, who lives in Texas, did not move in for longer stays after the baby came home, a tradition in their Nigerian culture. Her mother managed to make a much shorter visit, but with little time to gather the many ingredients for ji mmiri oku, a yam pepper soup offered to new mothers after birth.
Maduike will not soon forget to meet her baby in a mask. “There’s something so sad about that,” she said. “You’re terrified of breaking that barrier because you just don’t know.”
Due to pandemic travel restrictions, her father is stuck in Nigeria and still has not met her baby.
Liz Teich and her husband moved with their 3-year-old from Brooklyn to suburban New Rochelle in February 2020 before giving birth to their second child about two months later. They landed in a containment area during one of the first COVID spikes in the US. The hospital, under pressure from women who would give birth there, had just lifted the ban on birth partners in the delivery room while Teich was in labor.
“My husband had to leave the hospital two hours after giving birth,” she said. “I was lucky. I had a bleeding after the first delivery. I was really worried about being alone during a pandemic when the hospital was short on staff.”
Thirty hours after giving birth, Teich and her baby were home.
‘I didn’t even take a shower. I was too scared to touch the bathroom. We didn’t know if the virus was in the air or if it was on surfaces, or really anything about the virus at all. I usually worked from home because I was too scared to go, ”she said.
Teich found herself folded in a hospital parking garage during contractions less than two minutes apart, after circling around with her husband looking for a place because the valet service had been eliminated. She did not want to be impeached for fear that he would not be admitted alone.
“I thought, you know, if I gave birth in the car, it might be safer than in the hospital,” she laughed.
The pain of separation was felt in other ways as well.
Parham Zar, founder and director of the Egg Donor & Surrogacy Institute in Los Angeles, said that in the first months of the pandemic, parents awaiting 52 surrogate births experienced travel disruptions alone at his desk.
“The vast majority of the parents were in China, and although the biological parents are usually present during the birth of the child, they could not travel to the US to reunite with their children. Some surrogates took care of the children for months before they could be joined by his or her biological family, ”Zar said.
Jen Guyuron, in Cleveland, gave birth to a girl, Gigi, last March and she is pregnant again.
“No one has met Gigi and now we’re coming out with two babies,” she said. The hospital was actually closed when we entered. I vividly remember telling my husband not to cough or sneeze. We were in survival mode. “
Her mother, who waited in their car with her father at the hospital while she went into labor, wrote Guyuron a poem after Gigi arrived. It inspired Guyuron to write a poem for her new daughter. She turned her words into a children’s book, “The Baby in the Window,” which she self-published to let other pandemic mothers know they are not alone.
The story looks forward to easier times when parents can let others freely hold their babies, visit loved ones without a mask, and let their children play without pandemic concerns.
In Gigi’s case, siblings, grandparents, cousins, and friends first met her through the windows of Guyuron’s house. There were social dinners in her parents’ garage and meals on her patio, wrapped in blankets by a heat lamp.
“There is a lot of grief in our homes isolated with no family around,” said Guyuron. “It has been very difficult as a brand new mother. You expect to come home with all these big hugs and happiness and family, and we didn’t. “
Since Gigi has mostly only known masks on the faces of others, Guyuron wonders if revealed faces will shock her.
“She only knows masks,” said Guyuron. “They don’t scare her at all.”
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