How will we count the cost of having a baby during a pandemic? | Eva Wiseman
For everyone who went through a birth in the early days of lockdown, the longer-term effects and anxieties will take years to process
Two years ago today a good witch came very close and looked into the blacks of my eyes and said: “Look around, this is not your first birth. Everything’s different, it’s going to be OK,” then a few minutes later slid a new baby on to my chest and this was how our pandemic began.
Everything was different. Lockdown had started the week I went on maternity leave, and I gave birth in a time of PPE shortages and hands cracked from soap, and the prime minister leading the government from his hospital bed. There were no lateral flow tests then. The nurses who so elegantly looked after me were figuring things out as they went along – grappling with latex gloves, their plastic gowns man-sized, too long and too large. Soldiers had converted an exhibition centre in east London into one of the world’s largest hospitals; in Liverpool council bosses were discussing how to “grease the mortality highway” to prevent backlogs in mortuaries. Refrigerated shipping containers were accommodating extra bodies. Outside the hospital, I eyed a blacked-out coach with a livid kind of dread.
Read the original article at The Guardian