By Tina Cassidy

A new biography of the grunge band Nirvana claims that when rock queen Courtney Love was in labor with her only child, Francis Bean, at a Los Angeles hospital in 1992, her husband, Kurt Cobain, was bed-ridden in the same facility as he tried to kick his heroin addiction.

And so Love, hooked up to an IV drip, barged into his room yelling: "You get out of this bed and come down now. You are not leaving me to do this by myself, [expletive deleted] you."

Cobain, in fact, did make his way to the maternity floor, where he was by his wife's bed, semiconscious and vomiting; Love, meanwhile, rubbed his stomach while she contracted.

I am fascinated by this story for reasons that go beyond the lurid details. (Cobain left the hospital the next day to buy heroin.)

First of all, Love's reason for dragging Cobain to her side during the birth seems, more than anything, centered on wanting to show him the pain and suffering she would experience. Although such a martyr complex is far more common among pregnant women than we'd like to admit, most of us instead say we want our partners there to share the joy or help bond the family.

But is that honestly what happens?

Having men witness birth is, historically speaking, an artificial idea that emerged out of the natural childbirth movement in the 1960s and '70s. In the millennia before that time, there was virtually no place on earth where a father would watch his own child's emerge. W omen were either too modest or thought men were unclean and dangerous. Birth was strictly within the realm of women and having a male there was considered immoral, repugnant, and, frankly, stupid.

However, when birth moved from the home to the hospital, women were suddenly without their female support network – midwives, friends, family – and were often left to labor alone. Suddenly, mothers began insisting that the father be present to experience the joy of the birth. It was an idea that hospitals could no longer argue with. So men were allowed in. And now the concept is so universal that even if the father is undergoing heroin withdrawal, he is not excused.

However, since men began participating in labor and delivery – we even gave them the cheeky job title of birth "coach" -- divorce rates have not declined, but the use of artificial hormones to stimulate labor have, as have the number of cesareans sections. (In America nearly half of all women who deliver in a hospital have Pitocin and nearly one out of every three end up with a cesarean.) Fathers may be witnessing birth, but they certainly aren't helping the process.

Take my own case, a prolonged labor which ended in an unexpected cesarean. Despite the prenatal reading and classes in which my husband had immersed himself, he did not know what to do or say when contractions became unbearable. Yes, he held my hand and said encouraging things, but he became irrelevant and practically invisible to me, save for when he whipped out a snack about 10 hours into labor. I was pretty hungry, too, but hospitals rules forbade me to eat.

After my cesarean, which of course he was required to attend, he took off his surgical mask and, white as a ghost, excused himself because he thought he was going to be sick. Suddenly I was a witness to his pain and suffering. And at that moment, I felt closer to him than ever.

Tina Cassidy is the author of Birth: A History. She lives in Boston with her husband and their three-year-old son.

Local Information