is wrong with this woman's ex-husband? Her daughter should NOT be in the same room as her step-mother gives birth! Oh, and Salon readers who have twisted this into a home birth vs. hospital birth debate I suggest you go back and re-read the letter.

...atleast the guy had the good sense to ask you for your permission. And now, the bad news: Why are you vacillating?

Your personal feelings in this do not matter. The girl should not be in that delivery room and that's final! It's his wife - it's their baby together. And it's NOT the teenage daughter's event-of-a-lifetime, and nor should it be.

She should be looking forward to celebrating her own childhood "firsts," like entering adulthood before she celebrates delivery-room childbirth. Even those of us who have already given birth sometimes finds it difficult to watch the reality TV shows on during the daytime of women giving birth!

No, she should not be there. Tell him "no," and do not yield if he whines.

Why all these responses that because it's her sibling, the daughter somehow needs to be in the delivery room in order to properly bond with the baby. What a silly idea. The majority of siblings in the western world, half or whole, meet their siblings without having witnessed the birth and I doubt this impacts the bonding one way or the other.

If anything, associating her sibling with agonizing scream and blood could hinder the bonding, rather than help it.

the automatic best outcome is not necessarily having the girl committed to be in the room. Things can get weird-- our first was born only after 48 hours of labor and a C-section. If it's in the middle of the week, or whatever, it can cause unnecessary complication. And it is, by and large, an adult experience that a kid shouldn't feel awful about missing. Not every hospital is set up to handle kids in a decent way around childbirth. Anyway, one can visit immediately after, etc.

So no pushing from Dad, and whatever the compromise is, no grief or resentment from Mom.

Do consider checking her out, though. She'll never again be that naked in your presence.

Are you safer giving birth at home with a midwife? The sad truth is that you're safest when your healthcare provider isn't looking over his/her shoulder for the malpractice lawyers. THIS is what drives the high-intervention mindset in hospital births. In fact, this is what drives most of what is dangerous about modern medicine.

First, the new (step)mother gets to decide who is in her room during the event. And who isn't. We don't know her opinion yet.

Second, the parentS of the girl should have some party line on whether the girl is one of those people.

Third, most kids know what they can handle about that sort of thing. She's unlikely to say yes and then be traumatized.

Fourth, one of the editor's choice letters reminded Mom about divorce politics. More than anything, bad calls about this will introduce trauma. Neutralize it by being supportive and positive, drive the girl to the hospital and back (Dad will want to hang around, right?), and basically let the girl know that it's OK to bond with her half-brother. If you make her pick sides on this you will screw her up for a long time.

Fifth, since you seem a little jealous of the new wife, why don't you join the daughter in the room? Good chance to check out Stepmom's vagina, and be reassured.

Nobody has pointed out the obvious - the ex-husband is trying to get his daughter and his new wife to bond in a way that pointedly excludes the girl's real mother and imbues the "new family" with an importance the real mother can't ever compete with. It's a sly attempt to hurt his ex.

Tara21: Thank you for posting the link to some of the statistics regarding hospital versus home birth. Many of those studies are what's called case-control. They take women undergoing home birth and matching them on certain characteristics with women who didn't undergo home birth. The problem is that correlation is not causation. For instance, one statistic that was quoted was that fetal distress rate was 6 times higher in hospital. We don't know whether that was caused by the hospital environment or whether the women who chose to go to the hospital did so because they knew they were at higher risk to begin with.

Anonymous @ 3:00 p.m.: The Cochran Database, an organization that collects and organizes data from studies all over the world, concluded that, overall, there's no difference in mortality between hospital and home birth. So, saying that "the specific intervention of doctors" increases risk just doesn't hold up.

@borinquena: You said: Babies born in the hospital are more likely to be premature and to be born to women with HELLP, preeclampsia, diabetes and other life-threatening conditions. That's why death rates are higher in the hospital. If you compare low-risk women in the hospital with low-risk women at home, there is a small but statistically significant increase in the death rate at the home births. Exactly! That's the point I was trying to make.

I guess the bottom line is that the decision regarding home birth versus hospital birth is going to vary depending on the situation of each unique woman. For some women, home birth will be a viable choice, and for others, would be extremely dangerous. That's a far cry from what the poster expatriot implied, which was that hospitals were Frankenstein's laboratories and ob/gyns were vivisectionists. Rhetoric like that won't solve the controversy, which is fairly long-standing, and is frankly insulting to the women and men who choose ob/gyn as a career.

How does this relate to the original LW's question? Just as the home birth versus hospital birth question depends on each woman's unique circumstances, the question of whether or not to let the 14 year-old in the delivery room will depend on the personality, level of maturity, and wishes of the 14 year-old in question. I personally think it's rather creepy of the father to insist on this, but that's just my opinion.