French for Birth

On a placid Parisian night last March, my wife, Chrystèle, who is French, and I were in a public hospital delivery room waiting for our baby boy to settle into the right position for birth. He was in no hurry. Hours passed languidly, counted off by the periodic beeps of machines monitoring the expectant mother and our unborn infant.

There's a lot to worry about when your wife is in labor. There are moments of discomfort, jubilation, and chest-hollowing anguish. But mostly there are moments of waiting in which all sorts of stress-inducing thoughts can fill your mind. The unforgettable time when you introduce a new life to the world is surrounded by moments when you realize that you could lose your baby, or even your wife.

In the silence, I mulled becoming a father at the nadir of the worst global economic crisis in my life even as my profession, print journalism, was on the ropes. The thing about impending parenthood, I was told, is that a distinctive form of clarity comes when you hear the baby's first cries.

Suddenly a machine began beeping urgently. Within a minute, the delivery team was agitating around Chrystèle. The baby was under extreme stress. His heart rate was falling fast. Chrystèle's blood pressure was declining precipitously, too. An intern quickly escorted me out to the hallway, trying not to alarm me—and failing.

The hallway echoed with paternal helplessness. Doors to various delivery rooms and maternity rooms opened and closed, leaking a slow-motion cacophony of birth and baby sounds: cooing, screams, laughter, wailing. To avoid thinking about how little I could—or should—affect things in the delivery room, I began speaking to another fretful father-to-be. Just seven months pregnant, his wife was about to give birth to a baby so small he would be able to hold it in his hand. It struck me that if either of us were in the U.S., we would face concerns beyond the immediate health of mother and baby.

Most of my insured friends in the U.S. confront a jumble of calculated gambles that balance affordability and probability, copays and deductibles. One couple in Oakland, Calif., was ecstatic because they "only" had a $1,200 copay for their full-package birth—everything from labs to epidural to two nights in the hospital (and it would have covered inducing labor, if necessary). How that much money, on top of their insurance premiums, could go with the word "only" became clear when they told me that the hospital billed the insurance company $30,000.

A colleague in New York, whose wife has high-grade insurance coverage through her work, paid $15 copays for numerous checkups, as well as an additional $500 for two nights in a private recovery room.

Friends in Los Angeles wrote me to say that after meeting numerous deductibles, the nightly cost of their hospital room was $100 for the child they had in a public hospital and twice that for their second child, in a private one, among other uncovered costs. "We definitely had to be concerned about how many days she had to spend in the hospital," my old friend wrote. Uninsured parents in California cities can get a bill of around $16,000 for a basic birth.