Partner Exclusion from Childbirth During COVID-19 in Canada: Implications for Theory and Policy

ABSTRACT

We explore partner exclusion from perinatal care in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants’ narratives show that pregnant couples frame partner presence as a [human] right that was denied, and articulated this as denial of the “right to experience” and the “right to care.” These restrictions deprived birth partners and families of an experience that is important to them, and represent a repudiation of the resurgence of birth as a social event which entails valued forms of care. We show that the medical establishment’s commitment to partner presence during perinatal care is weak, although caring masculinity is normative.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• caring fatherhood
• childbirth
• COVID-19
• partner exclusion
• professional culture of obstetrics
• right to care

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Study was conceptualized by Kathleen Rice, and all data were collected by Kathleen Rice. Kathleen Rice and Sarah Williams collaborated on analysis of data and the writing of this manuscript.

Notes

1. In Canada, Indigenous communities in the North largely did not experience medicalization of childbirth until the 1950s, when the federal government instituted a number of policies to bring birth under control of the health system and physicians and, later, required that Northern Indigenous women be flown South to birth, a practice that completely separated Northern Indigenous people from their families and ceremonies during birth (Shaw 2013).

2. While we are aware that not all birthing people are women and all birth partners are men, much literature discusses men specifically, and this is thus reflected in this literature review. Anthropologists have been interested in men’s involvement in pregnancy and childbirth since the earliest days of the discipline. However, early literature focused primarily on documenting practices that struck early anthropologists as exotic and strange vis a vis normative masculinities and fatherhoods in Britain and the United States; for a review and critique of this literature, see (Powis 2021:414–416).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through their Canada Research Chairs Program [grant number CRC263545].

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Rice

Kathleen Rice is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Mcgill University, where she holds the Tier II Canada Research Chair in the Medical Anthropology of Primary Care. Her work aims to expose the underlying discourses, ideologies, and categories that shape healthcare practice, as well as the relations of power that underpin them. Driven by a commitment to high-quality, equitable care for all, her research program is theory-driven, and aims to improve the health of marginalized communities in particular.

Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She is an applied medical anthropologist, birthworker, and scholar of global and Indigenous perinatal health. Her scholarship is primarily focused on the relationship between racialization, medical racism, and reproductive health in Mexico and Canada, with particular attention to the role of midwifery and community birthworkers in reproductive justice movements.