Women gave birth

Experiences of Women Who Gave Birth in US Hospitals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

. 2021 Jan 12;8:2374373520981492.

doi: 10.1177/2374373520981492. eCollection 2021.

Elizabeth Mollard¹, Amaya Wittmaack²

Affiliations

¹ University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA.
² University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.

PMID: 34179360
PMCID: PMC8205382
DOI: 10. 1177/2374373520981492

Free PMC article

Elizabeth Mollard et al. J Patient Exp. 2021.

Free PMC article

. 2021 Jan 12;8:2374373520981492.

doi: 10.1177/2374373520981492. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Elizabeth Mollard¹, Amaya Wittmaack²

Affiliations

¹ University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA.
² University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.

PMID: 34179360
PMCID: PMC8205382
DOI: 10.1177/2374373520981492

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe the experiences of women who gave birth in a US hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Women who gave birth between March and July 2020 completed a survey on the experience of giving birth during a pandemic. Of this, 885 women were consented and participated in the study; 22.5% of women reported hypertension, 33.8% reported anxiety, 18.6% reported depression, and 1.13% reported testing positive for COVID-19. Of this, 61% of women reported inadequate support for childbirth, and 20. 5% reported that they did not feel safe giving birth in the hospital. Women who tested positive for COVID-19 were more likely to be of Asian race, have a cesarean delivery, not have a birth partner present, and discontinue breastfeeding before 6 weeks. Pandemic-related changes to maternity care practices may have impacted birthing women's perceptions of safety and support in the hospital environment and affected symptoms of stress. Health care policy and maternity care practices should promote feelings of safety and control and overall experience for women giving birth in the hospital during a pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; health care; patient safety; planning or policy; pregnant; women’s health.

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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South African woman gives birth to 10 babies in Pretoria - reports

Published
9 June 2021

Update 23 June 2021: The Gauteng Provincial government has since released a statement saying medical tests show that Gosiame Sithole had not given birth recently, and nor had she been pregnant.

Image source, African News Agency (ANA)

Image caption,

Gosiame Thamara Sithole, pictured here a month ago, gave birth on Monday

A South African woman has reportedly given birth to 10 babies in what would be a new world record.

Gosiame Thamara Sithole's husband says they were astonished by decuplets after scans only showed eight in the womb.

"It's seven boys and three girls. I am happy. I am emotional. I can't talk much," her husband Teboho Tsotetsi told Pretoria News after the birth.

One South African official confirmed the births to the BBC, however another said they were yet to see the babies.

A family member, who did not want to be identified, told the BBC that Ms Sithole had had 10 babies - five via natural birth and 5 via caesarean section.

Guinness World Records told the BBC it was investigating Ms Sithole's case.

A woman who had eight babies in the US in 2009 currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive.

Last month, 25-year-old Halima Cissé from Mali gave birth to nine babies, who are reportedly doing well at a clinic in Morocco.

Africa Live: Latest news and views from the continent
The 'controlled chaos' of raising sextuplets

Most pregnancies involving large numbers of babies end prematurely, says BBC Africa's health reporter Rhoda Odhiambo.

Multiple births involving more than three babies are rare and often the result of fertility treatments - but in this case the couple say they conceived naturally.

Prayers and sleepless nights

Ms Sithole, 37, previously gave birth to twins, who are now six years old.

She is said to be in good health after delivering 29 weeks into her pregnancy in Pretoria on Monday evening.

Speaking to Pretoria News a month ago, Ms Sithole said her pregnancy was "tough at the beginning" and she had prayed for a healthy birth, with many a sleepless night worrying about what was to come.

"How would they fit in the womb? Would they survive?" she asked herself, but was reassured by doctors that her womb was expanding.

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

Most pregnancies involving large numbers of babies end prematurely

When it was thought she was carrying eight foetuses, Ms Sithole was suffering leg pains and doctors found that two of the eight "were in the wrong tube".

"That was sorted and I have been okay since then. I can't wait for my children," she told the newspaper at the time.

Her husband also said he was over the moon, and felt like "one of God's chosen children. It's a miracle which I appreciate".

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Media caption,

Nigeria's twin town: Igbo-Ora has an unusually high birth rate of twins

Childbirth
Pretoria
South Africa
Pregnancy

90,000 Women over 40 gave birth to a record number of children since 1990 - RBC 90,001 90,002 Most often, they had second and third children in a row.

The average age of the birth of the first child has increased to 26 years, the Ministry of Labor reported

Photo: Alexander Avilov / AGN "Moscow"

given age category (the entire period of available statistics). This follows from the final annual demographic data of Rosstat, which RBC studied.

However, only 4% of all children born in 2021 were born to such mothers. The most active in terms of absolute childbearing rates is the group of women who were 31 years old in 2021 - 88.4 thousand children (if you look at one-year age intervals).

Since 2007, the number of births to women aged 40 and over has increased annually by an average of 8%, or 2.5 thousand children. The only exception was 2017, when the number of newborns among Russian women in this age category decreased by a symbolic 20 children. In 2021, the number of such babies increased by 3.6 times compared to 2007.

adv.rbc.ru

Most often, after 40 years, Russian women gave birth to the second and third children in order - 16. 5 thousand and 16.98 thousand, respectively. There were significantly fewer first-born and fourth-born babies - 7.9 thousand and 8.7 thousand. The fifth and later children became the smallest category - 6.6 thousand of them were born, follows from Rosstat data.

adv.rbc.ru

Russian women aged 29 to 33 inclusive gave birth to 431 thousand babies, that is, about a third of the total. Least of all children were expectedly born to Russian women under the age of 18 - 24.9thousand (2% of the total). In total, 1.398 million newborns appeared in Russia in 2021, which is 3% less than the result of the pandemic 2020. The birth rate was 9.6 births per 1,000 inhabitants.

The increase in the absolute number of births of children to women over 40 years of age is associated both with an increase in the number of this category of Russian women and with an increase in the birth rate, the Ministry of Labor explained to RBC.

“Thanks to the measures taken, a steady trend has formed to increase the number of third and subsequent births, which have grown by a third over the past eight years. The age after 35–40 years is the traditional time for the birth of third and subsequent children. In addition, the age cohort of women 40–49years, one of the most numerous and will continue to grow,” the department noted.

They also added that in recent years the average age at which a first child was born has increased.

“He went from 25.5 years in 2015 to 25.9 years in 2020. Today (in 2021), the average age at the birth of a woman's first child is 26 years," the Ministry of Labor said.

Postponing the debut of the birth of a child and, accordingly, an increase in the age of the mother at the birth of the next children is a global trend, points out Irina Kalabikhina, head of the Department of Population at the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University. “The most active group that contributes to fertility in most of Europe today are women aged 30-34. I suppose this can be considered a new model of the birth calendar in Russia, too, ”she notes.

The expert identified a number of key factors that influence the increase in the number of births to women at a more mature age, namely:

Reproductive literacy and an increase in the level of education of the population. “Russians are getting better at managing their reproductive lives, which affects the shift of births towards older ages, the age of desired births. At the same time, the share of people with higher education, which takes time to obtain, is growing. In addition, for many today it is important to build a career before the birth of children, since in this case it is easier to build a balance between family and work, ”Kalabikhina believes. According to Rosstat data, half of Russian women who have given birth to children over the age of 40 have a higher education.

Increased life expectancy. “Because of this, all stages of the life cycle are stretched: childhood and adolescence, the debut of the birth of a child and all subsequent births, respectively,” says the expert. Since 2005, life expectancy in Russia has grown steadily and in 2019 reached 73.3 years. True, due to the pandemic, the growth of the indicator was interrupted; at the end of 2021, it amounted to just over 70 years.

Development of reproductive technologies. “The technological factor has made it possible to have children, especially second and third ones, at older reproductive ages and even beyond the usual reproductive age of women,” says Kalabikhina. So, for example, according to Rosstat, in 2021, 11 children were born to mothers aged 60 and older.

Fertility stimulation policy. “For many years, since 2006, Russia has been pursuing a policy of encouraging the birth of second and third children. The increase in births at older ages is partly the success of this policy, ”says the head of the department of economics at Moscow State University.

Today in Russia there are various measures to stimulate the birth rate, including monthly payments for women registered in the early stages of pregnancy, payments for the first and second child for families with a certain income level, and others, but the most ambitious of them is the maternity program. capital operating since 2007. Initially, it extended to the second and subsequent children, but in 2020 it was extended to the first-born. In the scientific community, there are doubts about the effectiveness of mother capital, RBC wrote. At the first stage of the program, the program significantly spurred the birth rate in Russia, but now it is becoming less in demand due to the insufficiently transparent policy of prolongation and expansion, experts pointed out.

From the point of view of economics, it is not so much the age at which children are born that is important, but their number, says Alexander Shirov, Director of the INP RAS. For a simple reproduction of the population, it is necessary that every family has at least two children. Given the shift in the debut of the appearance of the first child, it becomes much more difficult for a woman to give birth to two children, and in the long term this trend negatively affects the economy, the expert states. The total fertility rate in Russia in 2020 and 2021 was 1. 5 (shows the average number of births per woman of reproductive age).

Stories of women who gave birth after 40 years / childbirth after 40 years, late pregnancy | v1.ru

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Three different opinions of late mothers - read them0003

Not every woman dares to give birth after 40 years. Becoming a mother at an age when friends are already nursing their grandchildren is psychologically difficult. After so many years of living for yourself, for a career or something else - to plunge into the world of diapers, diapers and milk teeth, radically changing your life - a story about our heroines. No longer young, but mothers told us why they decided to give birth for themselves, how they felt pregnancy and answered the most frank question - did they regret what they had done?

- I never planned a child, I was in harmony with myself, I adhered to childfree ideas, which society for the most part considers wild, wrong: if I think so, it means that I am abnormal, sick, I have a disorder. There were always questions, like a reminder of the ticking clock, I silently listened, nodded, did not enter into polemics. Everything changed when my mother died. At that moment, I was depressed, vulnerable, and for a split second I thought that I was wrong. I was left alone in this world, and it was as if an avalanche covered me, all the phrases said to me surfaced: “Give birth before it’s too late”, “How is it, without a child”, “You poor woman, lonely, so grow old” and the like . To say that I experienced an animal fear of loneliness and a feeling of my own worthlessness is to say nothing. I fell into a trance and decided to give birth.

I will omit details about my father, but the fact remains. At the age of 41, I found out that I was pregnant, but the news did not cause particularly positive emotions, it’s just - okay, so we’re giving birth. Of course, they immediately put me in the risk group, they explained how likely it is to give birth to a child with chromosomal abnormalities and Down syndrome. But, apparently, someone from above protected me, since the pregnancy was going well, there were no problems, but I still decided to give birth not in an ordinary maternity hospital, but in a perinatal center in order to protect both myself and my daughter.

As a result: I am not married, I live alone, I work. Now I am 45 years old, my daughter is 3 years old. I gave birth, as they say, for myself, and honestly - I didn’t experience any joy of motherhood, but all the “mothers” throw stones at me, maybe I even regret it a little. I love my daughter, she is smart, besides her, I really have no one, just like she has, except me. But being a single mother after 40 is hard both psychologically and physically. Health no longer allows me to give her what I could have given 10-15 years ago.

I still work a lot, sleep little, I see that she feels a lack of maternal attention. At playgrounds, it happens that they look at me, they think that I am her grandmother, in polyclinics I am also often mistaken for Arina's grandmother. I really gave up externally, I got older. Now it seems to me that it would be better if I were still alone. I am ashamed of these thoughts, but they are, and I think you should not be ashamed to express them.

— When I found out that I was pregnant, I was overjoyed, my husband and I could not believe our happiness. This is our first child. For many, it happens that career and finances go to the fore, so it was with us. But I always knew that I would have a child. I was preparing for pregnancy, underwent examinations, the doctors gave the go-ahead. Of course, there were fears, but now young people also have risks. During pregnancy, I felt good, up to 7 months I was training. The pregnancy itself made a big impression on me. While I was on maternity leave, I wrote a book. I wrote for a long time, but I couldn't finish it. I was not afraid of childbirth or anything else. I had a wonderful doctor in whom I was 100% sure. I was constantly asked the question: “Sveta, when will you give birth?” Now they have calmed down. As a mother, I feel great, we get along well with my son, he has already gone to kindergarten. I am friends with young mothers, they admire the fact that I was able to give birth myself at that age. My husband and family are happy and satisfied. We would like another child, but so far we are only thinking about it.

Maria says that she truly felt motherhood only for the second time

Photo: Yury Orlov / Network of city portals

— When she learned about the pregnancy, which she did not dare, she was very pleased and puzzled: the working rhythm did not work did not expect a temporary loss of life. There were no special health restrictions, so the pregnancy flew by very quickly. I can’t say that when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, I felt somehow different, I had an active lifestyle in both cases. I swam, skated, skied as long as my growing belly allowed.

There was no fear, being in anticipation of the upcoming event throughout my pregnancy, I felt great joy and even pride that I would now have not one, but two children. The eldest daughter was 21 years old at the time of the birth, and she was no longer a child at all. I was a little afraid of how my daughter would perceive my pregnancy. But the fears were in vain, Maria burst into tears of joy for us. The news of the pregnancy did not take her husband by surprise. The family also knew no bounds. My daughter was born prematurely, I had a caesarean section.

Motherhood after 40 is a process that you enjoy in all its manifestations. The first child was very desired and loved, but I began to taste and enjoy leisurely motherhood only with the second child.