Once you're done rolling your eyes, we can get back to the topic at hand. First and foremost, who attends a birth is a couple's mutual decision. If both parents are fine with one partner not attending, then great — you've come to a mature agreement. Go about your business, and have a great day.
But if you take a moment to think about it, you'll realize: Only one partner has the option not to attend birth. The other partner, the mother, has to be there as she is the one pushing the baby out of her body. Traditionally, having a baby would be impossible without her.
Call me selfish, but my birth philosophy was: If I have to be there, you have to be there too.
This is not to mention the fact that I actually wanted the love and support of my husband during delivery. I wanted him to share every moment of the experience so that we had the same memories of bringing our kids into the world.
He handled it. He saw some terrible and unspeakable things, including my greatest fear — what may or may not have been poop in the birthing pool. He lived to have sex with me another day.
Daily Mail writers Rachel Rounds and Tracey Cox recently took on the battle of the father-in-the-birthing-room debate. Rounds asserted that the best way to have a healthy sex life was to ban the father from birth. Cox took the opposite approach.
Cox stated, "Surely it's not too much to ask that men are grown up enough to be able to rationalise that the vagina has two functions: one for pleasure and one to deliver babies?"
Exactly. Once again, this birthing room decision is at the discretion of each couple. But if a man just can't possibly handle seeing his wife's vagina in that state, there's a problem. As Cox pointed out, grown men need to rationalize that it is possible for the vagina to have more than one function, beyond sex.
If your husband can't handle watching you give birth, you'd better not breastfeed in front of him either. That will ruin sex for good.
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