NEW YORK (AP) – Pregnancy, birth and life with a newborn in the midst of a pandemic have caused high anxiety, ever-changing hospital protocols and intense isolation for many of the millions of women around the world who have done so .
As the pandemic spreads into the second year and economic concern persists, demographers are studying the reasons why a pandemic is expected to occur. Meanwhile, women have learned to disguise themselves in masks and introduce novelties to their loved ones through windows.
Fear, anxiety, and chaos were particularly acute in New York City during the early months of the pandemic in one of the country’s most devastating hot spots.
Whitnee Hawthorne gave birth to her second child on May 7 at a New York City hospital. Ten months later, her baby has not yet met her paternal grandparents, who live in Louisiana.
“Our first child met them the second week of their lives,” said Hawthorne, whose husband was fortunately by her side after the ban on couples during childbirth was lifted at his hospital several weeks before his time. .
As a black woman, she said, she had decided to leave the state instead of having a single party.
“I’m very aware of the high maternal mortality rates for black women, and besides, after having a negative experience with a nurse during my first birth, I was scared,” Hawthorne said.
Like Hawthorne, Nneoma Maduike was masked when she gave birth on August 1 to her second child, a son, after a pregnancy full of unknowns.
“The anxiety was absolutely horrible. Information was evolving as fast as anything you could imagine, ”said Maduike, who lives in Brooklyn. “I did not know what to do. My husband is a doctor and he still went there every day and that caused even more anxiety ”.
Twenty-four hours after a cesarean, Maduike was allowed to return home. Hospitals at the time were trying to protect new mothers and babies from the virus by shuffling them prematurely, also relieving the burden of skeletal canes.
While her husband was within reach of childbirth, neither knew the hospital would require her newborn to stay in Maduike’s room, rather than the daycare, as a precaution. Her husband left home to be with her eldest son, leaving her to care for the baby alone shortly after surgery. Then it was a struggle for her husband to re-enter the hospital for safety reasons.
Of course, there were no visitors to contrast with his first delivery. No friends were allowed to pass by the hospital with balloons, flowers and food. Maduike’s mother, who lives in Texas, did not move for an extended stay after the baby returned home, a tradition of her Nigerian culture. Her mother got a much shorter visit, but with little time to gather the many ingredients for ji mmiri oku, a yam pepper soup that is offered to new mothers after birth.
Maduike will soon not forget to meet her baby with a mask. “There’s something so sad about that,” he said. “You’re scared to remove that barrier because you just don’t know it.”
Due to pandemic restrictions on travel, her father remains trapped in Nigeria and has yet to meet her baby.
Liz Teich and her husband moved with their 3-year-old son in February 2020 from Brooklyn to New Rochelle, a suburban neighborhood, before giving birth to their second child about two months later. They landed inside a containment zone on one of the first COVID climbs in the United States. The hospital, under pressure from the women who were to give birth there, had just lifted the ban on couples in the delivery room when Teich went to work.
“My husband had to leave the hospital two hours after the birth,” she said. “I was lucky. I suffered bleeding after the first birth. I was very worried about being alone during a pandemic when the hospital had little personality.
Thirty hours after the 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 transmitted through the air or if it was on surfaces, or really anything related to the virus. I mostly worked at home because I was too scared to go, ”he said.
Teich found herself bent over in a hospital parking garage during separate contractions less than two minutes after walking around with her husband looking for a place because the concierge service had been removed. He didn’t want to be let go, for fear he wouldn’t be allowed in alone.
“I thought, you know, that if I gave birth in the car, I could be safer than in the hospital,” he laughed.
The pain of separation was also felt in other ways.
Parham Zar, founder and CEO of the Egg Donation and Replacement Institute in Los Angeles, said that during the early months of the pandemic, parents expecting 52 births through replacement were affected by the barriers. travel only to your agency.
“The vast majority of parents were in China, and although biological parents are usually present during the child’s birth, they could not travel to the United States to join their children. Some surrogates cared for the children for months before their biological family could accompany them, ”said Zar.
Jen Guyuron, in Cleveland, gave birth last March to a baby girl, Gigi, and is pregnant again.
“No one knew Gigi and now we’re dating two babies,” she said. “The hospital basically closed when we came in. I vividly remember telling my husband that we better not cough or sneeze. We were in survival mode.”
Her mother, who with her father was waiting in her car at the hospital while she was in labor, wrote a poem to Guyuron after Gigi arrived. He inspired Guyuron to write a poem to his new daughter. She turned her words into a children’s book, “The Baby in the Window,” which she self-published as a way to let other pandemic mothers know that they are not alone.
The story awaits easier times, when parents are free to let others hold their babies, visit them with maskless loved ones, and let their children play without pandemic worries.
In Gigi’s case, siblings, grandparents, cousins and friends met her for the first time through the windows of Guyuron’s house. There were socially distanced dinners in her parents ’garage and meals in her backyard wrapped in blankets by a heat lamp.
“There’s a lot of isolated sadness in our homeless homes around,” Guyuron said. “She has been very tough as a new mother. Hope to come home with these big hugs, happiness and family, and we had nothing ”.
Since Gigi only knows the masks on the faces of others, Guyuron wonders if the revealed faces will be discordant to him.
“She only knows the masks,” Guyuron said. “They definitely don’t scare her.”
___
Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie