Expecting mothers can experience enormous amounts of worry and anxiety. With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world, expecting mothers have even more reasons to be worried when hospitals are separating newborns from their mothers within seconds of birth.
"I saw her and felt her on my chest for like maybe three to five seconds."
This is what mother, Veronica Batton, told KSHB in a story by Lindsay Shively, March 24th.
Veronica Batton emailed her doctor with concerns about a cough. She agreed to be tested for the coronavirus, but the test results were not back by the time she went into labor.
According to KSHB, Batton claimed, it took a full week for the results to come back, four days after she gave birth to her baby girl at St. Luke’s East Hospital in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
While waiting for the test results, Veronica had no contact with her newborn daughter other than the 3-5 seconds directly after delivery, the story reports.
Christopher Frizzelle, writing for The Stranger out of Seattle, reports that separating newborns from their mothers if the mother tested positive for COVID-19 is the recommendation of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is based on CDC recommendations.
"But if the mom is a PUI or is COVID-positive, the recommendation from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) is that medical staff should maintain social distancing of at least six feet between the mom and the baby. In other words, 'Not to do skin-to-skin contact. And the mom goes through labor in a mask. Can you imagine going through natural childbirth, breathing, working, in an air mask the whole time? And then we deliver, and we try to keep them separate from each other.'"
Gretchen Vogel with Science posed the question in a recent story:
“Do newborn babies need to be separated from mothers infected with the new coronavirus?”
Vogel reports,
“The scant data available have led to apparently contradictory recommendations: Some health authorities, including in China and the United States, recommend isolation of newborns from their infected mothers; others, including the World Health Organization (WHO), strongly recommend breastfeeding and keeping mothers and babies together, while taking precautions such as the mother wearing a mask.”