Anxiety, confusion, relief: ng birth in pandemic
NEWYORK— Pregnancy, birth and life with a newborn in the middle of a pandemic has brought on high anxiety, ever-shifting 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 worry persists, demographers are studying the reasons for an anticipated pandemic baby bust. Women, meanwhile, have learned to go through labor in masks and to introduce fresh arrivals to loved ones through windows.
Fear, anxiety and chaos were particularly acute in New York City during the early months of the pandemic in what was one of the country’s most devastating hot spots.
Whitnee Hawthorne gave birth to her second son May 7 in a New York hospital. Ten months later, her baby has yet to meet his paternal grandparents, who live in Louisiana.
“Our first son met them the second week of his life,” said Hawthorne, whose husband was thankfully by her side after a ban on birth partners during delivery was lifted at their hospital several weeks before her time.
As a Black woman, she said, she had decided she would leave the state rather than be in labor alone.
“I’m keenly aware of the high maternal death rates for Black women and also, having had 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 Aug. 1 to her second child, a son, after a pregnancy filled with unknowns.
“The anxiety was absolutely awful. Information was evolving as quickly as anything you can imagine,” said Maduike, who lives in Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what guidance to follow. My husband’s a doctor and he was still going in every single day and that brought on even more anxiety.”
Twenty-four hours after a cesarean section, Maduike was cleared to go home. Hospitals at the time were attempting to protect new mothers and babies from the virus by shuffling them out early, lightening the load as well on skeleton staffs.
While her husband was on hand for the birth, neither knew the hospital would require their newborn to stay in Maduike’s room, rather than the nursery, as a precaution. Her husband went home to be with their older child, leaving her to care for the baby alone soon after surgery. Then it was a struggle getting her husband back inside the hospital due to safety concerns.
There were no visitors, of course, in stark contrast to her first delivery. No friends were permitted to drop by the hospital with balloons, flowers and food. Maduike’s mother, who lives in Texas, didn’t move in for an extended stay after the baby came home, a tradition in their Nigerian culture. Her mother did manage a far shorter visit, but with little time to gather the many ingredients for ji mmiri oku, a yam pepper soup offered to new moms after birth.
Jen Guyuron, in Cleveland, gave birth last March to a girl, Gigi, and she’s pregnant again.
“Nobody met Gigi and now we’re coming out with two babies,” she said. “The hospital was basically shutting down right as we walked in. I vividly remember telling my husband that he better not cough or sneeze. We were in survival mode.”
Her mom, who with her dad waited in their car at the hospital while she was in labor, wrote Guyuron a poem after Gigi arrived. It inspired Guyuron to write a poem to her 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 moms know they aren’t alone.