Giving birth is emotionally and physically exhausting, a traumatic event. It's only been in recent years where hospitals have, due to overwhelming requests by birthing mothers who wanted their husbands/SO's to support them through childbirth, that these men have even been allowed in the sterile environment of a birthing suite.
Roll forward a decade or so, and suddenly the poor woman in the throes of labor finds herself surrounded by two sets of grandparents, both with video film rolling, a few siblings, even a niece and nephew because their parents wanted them to "witness the miracle of birth" at the poor mother-to-be's expense. She doesn't want any of this, but in between contractions can't get a word in edgewise because the damned room is wall to wall people, all laughing, giggling, having a party while she endures some of the most excruciating pain of her life.
Does this sound farfetched? It's not. I have several friends/acquaintances who found themselves in just such a predicament during their own childbirth process. That scenario is one of the reasons that the hospitals now insist on a list approved by the mother of just who is allowed to be in the delivery room, and limits the number of people on that list.
This man and this woman created a child together, but when it comes to carrying that child to term and expelling it through the birth canal, the woman is quite frankly on her own. After the child is born, after mother and baby have been medically examined and pronounced healthy, then the baby can and is seen by other family members, which in this case included the child's biological father.
All this donning of hair shirts and beating of chests is based only on the desire by some that men be allowed to control every facet of the woman's child-bearing process...control being the operative word here. It is silly, particularly since the people involved were estranged and didn't even like each other, and those who make such an argument appear to have their own gender agenda going on, and the well-being of the woman in labor, and by rote the child she is birthing, are quite clearly not part of that agenda.