What, Exactly, Expectant Dads Fear in the Delivery Room |
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Roughly 13 percent of expectant fathers experience pathological fear of childbirth. Most never say so aloud.
The delivery room is one of the few places where male competence runs out entirely. That is the point.
Watching a partner in pain while unable to help is among the most documented and least named paternal fears.
Presence, especially when scared, is not passivity. It is the first assignment of fatherhood.
Months ago, professor Scott Galloway’s riff on his podcast about new dads created an outcry and spread across the internet. Galloway, author of Notes on Being a Man, offered a take on dads of infants as a “waste of time” and called their presence in the delivery room “disgusting and unnatural.”
Galloway walked it back, calling his comment “intentionally provocative in the context of a friendly, snarky conversation.” Intended or not, it landed somewhere real: not with derelict dads looking for a professor's permission to disappear, but perhaps most with dads looking to show up to parenthood in full.
I work with these good guys. They are eager for parenting books, to grieve fathers they never had, and inspired to hop off the generational train of paternal violence. But in the delivery room, our longing turns medical: The beeps and sterility of the space, the influx of masked white coats for whom this is just another day, vitals suddenly being taken, needles, blood. Uncertainty.
And there you are, dad-to-be, in a baseball cap and beard, go-bag packed, snagging Au Bon Pain sandwiches, shuffling around with more time than expected. And then suddenly no time. Galloway and his guest, Derek Thompson, were correct. As dads, we are less in the mix and more standing in the mezzanine. Observers, not do-ers. Nothing to rescue, perform, or fix, which isn’t a “useless” position of mere attendance, but the first big assignment. Many of us are quietly scared: Thirteen percent of expectant fathers experience pathological fear of childbirth.
Here are five fears worth naming.
1: He'll be permanently changed by what he sees
For many new dads, the fantasy life around a woman's body was cobbled together long before fatherhood. The female figure is mentally rehearsed through high school-cafeteria-table bravado, porn, and the objectification baked into boyhood.
Underlying this fear is the possibility that our terror of the delivery room is as much about what might happen to his fantasies about her body as to her.
How do you know that these two versions of her, the object of lust and the one who's delivered a human to the world, will clash?
2: She'll be permanently changed, and he won't know how to meet her there
He is less worried about his own feelings and more worried that she will struggle with estrangement from her new body. Or that he will have to watch her suffer, unable to do anything about it.
From this, helplessness creeps in. He watches his partner literally transform while he lives in his head: supportive lines memorized, repositioning pillows like a Ball Boy, all of it measuring small against the expanse of bringing a life form out of a life form, which occurs in and through the body. And men witness what women go through as a kind of unattainable qualification: a Wonka door only one of us can walk through biologically. A wonder that seems to change something fundamental about who you are on the other side.
Moms inspire awe. Dads inspire "aww." What does "aww" cost a father who came ready to matter?
If she can give birth without us, what exactly did we come for?
3: That she will die, and he will be standing there
Expectant dads' biggest fears are for the baby, overshadowing sometimes a sneakier fear: losing mom.
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A father sits across from me, and I ask him what he's most afraid of. He pauses. Fear transforms into a logistical query: traffic to the hospital, telling work he has to miss, getting it all done.
I return to The Thing. The Terror. "But what could happen during the birth?" He eventually gets to it: "I keep seeing her not make it." "Tell me what you see." He's standing in the room. She's gone. He's holding the baby. I have the urge to reassure him. I don't. If this fear visits him alone at 3 am, it can visit him here too, with me.
I return to The Thing. The Terror.
"But what could happen during the birth?"
He eventually gets to it: "I keep seeing her not make it."
"Tell me what you see."
He's standing in the room. She's gone. He's holding the baby. I have the urge to reassure him. I don't.
If this fear visits him alone at 3 am, it can visit him here too, with me.
Sometimes I frame dads' existential terrors as a tax on entry into a deeper love: sometimes our greatest fears are proportional to our love on offer.
If you fear catastrophic loss, what are you telling yourself about how much she matters?
4: That he'll faint and become the patient
This one is easiest to laugh about until it happens. The vasovagal response is ungendered, but male shame is not. At the exact moment she needs him, his body gives out.
The man who came to ask the OB pointed questions and be her advocate, unflinching in reassurances, now needs nursing. The humiliation. Nurses pivot from her, in active labor, to him. Mom-in-progress pivots from the primal moment to track his well-being. Her body makes miracles, mine mutinies.
The man who came to ask the OB pointed questions and be her advocate, unflinching in reassurances, now needs nursing.
The humiliation. Nurses pivot from her, in active labor, to him. Mom-in-progress pivots from the primal moment to track his well-being.
Her body makes miracles, mine mutinies.
If you faint in the delivery room, what would that mean about you as a dad?
5: That he'll be useless in a room full of experts
You don't have to faint to feel useless. The delivery room’s choreography is designed around its lead. The hospital staff and beeping monitors track mom. As boys, we installed a vigilance organized around provision, adequacy, and the possibility of not rising to the moment our worth depends on. At the moment of birth, that radar finds little to lock onto. There was the imagined version of ourselves in that room, and the actual room doesn't need that action figure. It needs a man who can tolerate having no clear assignment.
Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott wrote that a father's earliest function is not to do things with the infant but to protect the space in which the mother can. Protecting a space is itself a competence. It’s not being a player on the field but being the field, the container itself.
In a room of experts who know exactly what to do, what's a father for?
Staying present, quietly scared, is the earliest duty of providing and protecting. You don't have to fix anything. Being here and not leaving is already the job.
Bergström, M., Rudman, A., Waldenström, U., & Kieler, H. (2013). Fear of childbirth in expectant fathers, subsequent childbirth experience and impact of antenatal education: Subanalysis of results from a randomized controlled trial. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 92(8), 967–973. https://doi.org/10.1111/aogs.12147Eriksson, C., Westman, G., & Hamberg, K. (2006). Content of childbirth-related fear in Swedish women and men: Analysis of an open-ended question. Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health, 51(2), 112–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmwh.2005.08.010
Gbinigie, N. I., Alderson, M. L., & Barclay, P. M. (2001). Informed consent, and fainting fathers. Anaesthesia, 56(6), 603–604. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2044.2001.2094-29.xJohansson, M., Wells, M. B., & Thies-Lagergren, L. (2021). A dreaded delight: A longitudinal qualitative interview study of paternal childbirth fear during the transition to fatherhood. European Journal of Midwifery, 5, 52. https://doi.org/10.18332/ejm/142783Moran, E., Bradshaw, C., Tuohy, T., & Noonan, M. (2021). The paternal experience of fear of childbirth: An integrative review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(3), 1231. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031231
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 585–595.
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