The Rise and Fall of National Women’s Hospital: A History by Linda Bryder

Author:Linda Bryder [Bryder, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Family Environment in Hospital

While most women opted for hospital childbirth from the 1950s, they constantly sought to make conditions there more comfortable. From that time, as part of their demand for ‘quality experience’ in childbirth, women campaigned for their husbands to be allowed to come with them into the maternity hospital. Auckland Hospital Board policy at that time did not permit this.61 In his 1964 inaugural lecture Bonham declared that husbands should be allowed to be with their wives ‘not only during the first stage but also at delivery’.62 In May that year Bonham persuaded the HMC to request the hospital board to delete the word ‘very’ from the ruling that ‘husbands and other lay people be not allowed in the precincts of the Labour Ward suites except in very special circumstances and then only after permission’.63 Two months later Bonham produced a memorandum suggesting that husbands might be present provided that both the mother and her husband desired it and that they had secured the agreement of the doctor or midwife in charge of the delivery. There were certain requirements for the husband: he had to have attended a course of antenatal instruction or been present at his wife’s previous confinement; he had to realise he was there ‘to support, encourage and comfort his wife at the head of the table and not as a spectator’; he had to be ‘properly garbed in cap, gown, mask and overboots to conform with routine theatre technique’; and, finally, he had to agree to leave the delivery room immediately if asked.64

Not all members of the medical staff approved of the presence of fathers, even under these strict guidelines. Senior consultant Bruce Grieve thought the scheme might embarrass the delivery suite nurses because of the large number of cases handled in the delivery suite and also because the nurses would have to decide whether or not the husband could remain with his wife if no doctor were present. He advocated ‘very strict control’ and a trial which should not be publicised. The HMC agreed to Bonham’s proposal on condition that it be marked ‘Not for Publication’.65 The Nursing Advisory Committee also discussed the proposal and agreed to a trial. The board chairman and the superintendent-in-chief responded that the hospital board adhered to its policy of no husbands, but advised that this could be ‘overruled on clinical grounds’.66

The demand to allow men to accompany their wives into hospital for childbirth had its ideological roots in the writings of British gynaecologist Grantly Dick-Read who believed it to be an important cornerstone of future family relationships. As he advised in Childbirth without Fear, which ran into many editions and was widely read in New Zealand as elsewhere, obstetricians needed to understand that the father’s presence at the birth enabled the husband and wife

… to be united in the most wonderful, awe-inspiring experience that can possibly fall to the lot of wedded human beings. There is no drama or playacting in the full recognition of the magnitude of this event to both of them.

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