With six weeks to go until her due date, Leah Cardin, a teacher in Burlington, Ont., was feeling confident in her birth plan. Her first labour, in 2017, had gone smoothly, and she hoped to have another positive experience with minimal interventions while delivering her second baby, who was due in April 2020. But then March Break arrived, along with a massive global health crisis, and everything changed. Her birth plan was no longer within her control.
The loneliness of pandemic pregnancies
?Most of my in-person midwife appointments were cancelled,? Cardin says. She saw her care provider face to face only twice in the last six weeks of her pregnancy, instead of weekly. She was told she couldn?t use nitrous oxide for pain management, as she had during her first labour. (Nitrous oxide requires respiratory equipment, which was in high demand, and there were concerns about aerosolization of COVID droplets, too. Labour and delivery departments have been reintroducing it since then, however.) A new set of rules was introduced at many hospitals, including mandatory masks (even for women in labour) and stringent symptom monitoring and screening questions at the door. Anyone with a runny nose, cough or fever would be asked to leave?including support partners like her husband. Terrified that she might end up giving birth alone, Cardin decided to plan a home birth in order to avoid the hospital. She decided on a water birth and bought her own birthing pool (due to COVID, you couldn?t r...