NEW YORK (AP) – Pregnancy, childbirth and living with a newborn amid a pandemic have caused a great deal of anxiety, ever-changing hospital protocols and intense isolation for many of the millions of women who have done so around the world.
As the pandemic extends to a second year and economic concerns continue, demographers are studying the reasons for an expected pandemic bust. Women, meanwhile, have learned to work in masks and introduce new arrivals to loved ones through windows.
Fear, anxiety and chaos were particularly sharp in New York City during the early months of the pandemic in one of the country’s most devastating hotspots.
Whitnee Hawthorne was born on May 7 in a hospital in New York to her second son. Ten months later, her baby has not yet met his grandparents’ fathers, who live in Louisiana.
“Our first son met them the second week of his life,” said Hawthorne, whose husband was happily by her side after a birth ban was lifted during childbirth a few weeks before her time in their hospital.
As a black woman, she decided she would leave the state rather than alone.
“I am well aware of the high maternal mortality rate among black women, and I was apprehensive as I had a negative experience with a nurse during my first birth,” Hawthorne said.
Like Hawthorne, Nneoma Maduike was masked when she gave birth to her second child, a son, on August 1 after a pregnancy filled with strangers.
“The anxiety was absolutely awful. Information develops as fast as you can imagine, ”said Maduike, who lives in Brooklyn. “I did not know what guidance I should follow. My husband is a doctor and he still went in every day and it caused even more anxiety. ”
Twenty-four hours after a caesarean section, Maduike was released to go home. Hospitals at the time tried to protect new mothers and babies from the virus by relocating them early, thus easing the burden on skeletons.
While her husband was on hand for the birth, none of them knew that the hospital, as a precaution, would require their newborn child to stay in Maduike’s room, rather than the nursery. Her husband went home to be with their older child, and had her take care of the baby alone shortly after the operation. Then it was a struggle to get her husband back in the hospital because of safety.
Of course, there were no visitors who were in stark contrast to her first delivery. No friends are allowed to visit the hospital with the balloons, flowers and food. Maduike’s mother, who lives in Texas, did not move in for a longer home after the baby came home, a tradition in their Nigerian culture. Her mother did pay a much shorter visit, but with little time to gather the many ingredients for ji mmiri oku, a sweet pepper soup is offered to new moms after birth.
Maduike will not soon forget to meet her baby in a mask. “There’s something so sad about it,” she said. “You’re terrified of eliminating the obstacle, because you just do not know.”
Due to pandemic travel restrictions, her father remains stuck in Nigeria and has yet to meet his 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 end up in a confinement area in one of the earliest COVID waves in the USA. The hospital, under pressure from women due to the delivery there, had just lifted its ban on maternity leave in the maternity ward when Teich went into labor.
“My husband had to leave the hospital two hours after the birth,” she said. “I was happy. I had bleeding after the first birth. I was very worried about being alone during a pandemic when the hospital was short.”
Thirty hours after she gave birth, Teich and her baby were home.
“I did not even shower. I was too scared to touch the bathroom. We did not know if the virus was in the air or if it was on surfaces, or really something about the virus. “I mostly worked from home because I was too scared to go,” she said.
Teich doubled herself in a hospital’s parking garage during fewer contractions after moving around with her husband looking for a place because the service was shut down. She did not want to be dropped off, for fear that he would not be allowed alone.
“I thought, you know, if I give birth in the car, it might be safer than in the hospital,” she laughed.
The pain of separation was also felt in other ways.
Parham Zar, founder and managing director of the Egg Donor & Surrogacy Institute in Los Angeles, said parents waiting for 52 births per surrogate for the first pandemic are affected by travel barriers at his agency alone.
‘The vast majority of parents were in China, and although the biological parents are usually present at 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 come together through his or her biological family,” Zar said.
Jen Guyuron, in Cleveland, gave birth to a girl, Gigi, last year and she is pregnant again.
“No one met Gigi and now we’re coming out with two babies,” she said. “The hospital basically closed when we walked in. I can well remember telling my husband that he had better not cough or sneeze. We were in survival mode. ”
Her mother, who was waiting with her father in their car in the hospital while she was giving birth, Guyuron wrote a poem after Gigi arrived there. 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 herself published to let other pandemic moms know they were not alone.
The story looks forward to easier times, when parents can let their babies hold on freely, hang out with loved ones without masks and let their children play without a pandemic.
In Gigi’s case, brothers and sisters, grandparents, cousins and friends first met her through the windows of Guyuron’s house. There was social dinner in her parents’ garage and meals on her porch wrapped in blankets by a heat lamp.
“There is a lot of sadness being isolated in our homes without family in the area,” Guyuron said. “It was really hard being a new mom. You expect to come home to all these big hugs and happiness and family, and we had none of that. ”
Since Gigi largely only knew masks on others’ faces, Guyuron wonders if revealed faces will scare her.
“She only knows masks,” Guyuron said. “They certainly do not scare her.”
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