A day after I submitted an article pitch on the rise of caesarean sections and premature births in India, I found myself lying in a hospital bed 28 weeks pregnant, tethered to monitors as doctors rushed in and out. I had come in for a routine prenatal check-up. Within hours, I was admitted. Before I could grasp what was happening, my son arrived, two months early through an emergency C-section, splitting my life into a clear before and after.
In India, motherhood continues to be narrated through the language of labour pain, sacrifice and endurance. What nobody had prepared me for was that my initiation into motherhood would look nothing like the stories I had grown up hearing — it would begin at the doors of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The NICU is unlike any other place. Your days are measured not by feeding schedules or sleepless nights but by oxygen saturation levels, heart-rate monitors and the beeping of machines. You learn to read numbers before you learn your baby’s expressions. Your first memories of motherhood are not of cradling your child but of looking at incubators and wires as you sit holding your baby for kangaroo mother care. You learn to sit for hours through lower abdomen pain as your stitches recover. You hold a baby of a few hundred grams wrapped in wires heavier than them as you try to make out their tiny features.
The trauma of a premature birth is emotional, psychological and profoundly isolating. You are recovering from a major surgery while your baby fights his own battle a few corridors away. Every visit to the NICU is a negotiation between hope and fear. What makes NICU motherhood especially difficult is that it is rarely understood. In a society that places the burden of a healthy pregnancy almost entirely on women, a premature birth intensifies that scrutiny. Did she travel? Did she not rest enough? The mother’s body becomes the site of investigation.
Unlike the growing conversation around postpartum depression, the emotional realities of NICU motherhood remain largely invisible. I found strange solidarities during my six weeks: Nurses, guards, staff and most importantly, other mothers. As I sat nursing my baby, mothers would come in, and sit with their babies. I heard them quietly sobbing as nurses urged them — and me — to stay positive and remember that our babies could sense our emotions. So we just looked at each other, mothers dressed in hospital gowns, as we suppressed our tears. We exchanged brief conversations in waiting rooms, celebrated small milestones together, and silently mourned each other’s setbacks. It made visible the scale of what we were going through.
Premature births are on the rise in India. While the nutritional health of mothers and the changing pattern of pregnancies contribute to this, a significant rise has been due to environmental factors. In the past five years, Delhi has seen a 21 per cent rise in preterm births. Another study by IIT Delhi in collaboration with international universities analysed data from the National Family Health Survey between 2015 and 2020 to establish that prolonged exposure to heat significantly increased the chances of preterm births and low birth weights. Perhaps we need to prepare for this new reality not only by learning how to care for fragile babies, but also by understanding what it means for the women who sit beside them, learning to become mothers in an unfamiliar world.
The writer is assistant professor, Jindal School of Design and Architecture, OP Jindal Global University
