They swaddle the baby before they put her in his arms, in a soft cotton blanket that practically engulfs her tiny body. It’s just the two of them, father and daughter, together in this hospital room on a late summer evening.
It’s a noisy place, the hospital. The rattle of utility carts, the ringing of phones, the scratch of pen on paper as someone hurriedly scrawls a note in a patient’s file. But coming from this room, there’s another sound—audible even through the closed door, loud enough that people passing by hear it, and look at each other, and wince. The crying is not the fussy squalling of a newborn, but a wild, horrible keening that makes your hair stand on end. The sound a father makes as he rocks the baby whose eyes never opened, and never will.
“It’s just beyond the depth of horror,” Tim Hanson remembers. He is 62 and a father of two—not including the daughter whose body he wept over in that hospital room, stillborn at 26 weeks. Today, when a woman goes into labor prematurely, the baby has a far better chance of survival. Twenty years ago, there wasn’t much to be done.
“I cried so hard, I scared the nurse,” Tim remembers. “She put her back against the wall at first, and then eventually she just fled.”
If the nurse’s reaction seems insensitive, it was also to be expected. Tim’s wife lost eight pregnancies in all. As well as this stillbirth, there were seven miscarriages. Each time, he encountered medical professionals who, despite their skill in matters of life and death, could not stand to acknowledge his grief. Some, like that nurse, found it frightening. Others ignored it—or worse. A year or two before the stillbirth, after an ultrasound revealed that another unborn baby’s heartbeat had stopped, the doctor who’d delivered the bad news found Tim and his wife collapsed in the hallway outside the ultrasound room. “He crouches down," Tim says. “And he said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hanson, but you know what? We can get you a sperm donor.’ ”
To the original sperm donor—the one who was weeping on the floor with his wife in his arms—the doctor said nothing at all.
Tim wants to tell me this last story, he says, because it’s funny—which is to say, he’s managed to put a humorous spin on something that was unfathomably painful at the time. (I do this, too. When people ask why I don’t have kids, my punchline is that I was so bad at IVF, my fertility doctor ghosted me. Ha, ha!)
But this doctor's absurd callousness also reveals something real, and heartbreaking, about how men are sidelined from conversations about pregnancy and childbirth, even when their emotional stake should be obvious. Once, flipping through a dusty basket of mid-century stationery at a flea market, I came across a 1940s greeting card, meant as a gag gift for expectant fathers. It read, “The stork brought it. Your wife carried it. The doctor spanked it. The nurse swaddled it. . . . ”—and then inside, above an illustration of a disheveled-looking man smoking and pacing alone in a hospital waiting room, the accusatory punch line: “What did you do?”