Some fathers have begun to hold their newborns skin to skin; the new baby is familiar with the fathers voice and it is believed that contact with the father helps the infant to stabilise and promotes father to infant bonding. Looking at recent studies, a 2019 review found that the level of oxytocin was found to increase not only in mothers who had experienced early skin to skin attachment with their infants but in the fathers as well, suggesting a neurobiological connection. If the infants mother had a caesarean birth, the father can hold their baby in skin-to-skin contact while the mother recovers from the anaesthetic. Hospitals
Historically, most women gave birth at home without emergency medical care available. In the early days of hospitalisation of childbirth, a 17th-century maternity ward in Paris was incredibly congested, with up to five pregnant women sharing one bed. At this hospital, one in five women died during the birthing process. At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, giving birth at home became more difficult due to congested living spaces and dirty living conditions. That drove urban and lower-class women to newly available hospitals, while wealthy and middle-class women continued to labour at home. Consequently, wealthier women experienced lower maternal mortality rates than those of a lower social class. Throughout the 1900s, there was an increasing availability of hospitals, and more women began going into the hospital for labour and delivery. In the United States, 5% of women gave birth in hospitals in 1900.
Midwife training in European cities began in the 1400s, but rural women were usually assisted by female family or friends. However, it was not simply a ladies social bonding event as some historians have portrayed – fear and pain often filled the atmosphere, as death during childbirth was a common occurrence. In the United States before the 1950s, a father would not be in the birthing room. It did not matter if it was a home birth; the father would be waiting downstairs or in another room in the home. If it was in a hospital, then the father would wait in the waiting room. Fathers were only permitted in the room if the life of the mother or baby was severely at-risk. In 1522, a German physician was sentenced to death for sneaking into a delivery room dressed as a woman.The majority of guidebooks related to pregnancy and childbirth were written by men who had never been involved in the birthing process. A Greek physician, Soranus of Ephesus, wrote a book about obstetrics and gynaecology in the second century, which was referenced for the next thousand years. The book contained endless home remedies for pregnancy and childbirth, many of which would be considered heinous by modern women and medical professionals.Both preterm and full term infants benefit from skin to skin contact, sometimes called Kangaroo care, immediately following birth and for the first few weeks of life.