If marriage had an annual award ceremony, like the Oscars, Dwyane Wade would win husband of the year.
The Miami Heat player sat down with Oprah and his wife, Gabrielle Union, to discuss the controversial delivery of their new daughter Kaavia James Union Wade.
During the interview, Wade addressed the social media backlash the couple received after Union was pictured on Instagram shortly after their daughter was born, wearing a hospital gown and holding the newborn to her bare chest.
“I think for me the most hurtful thing was once we had our baby and everybody started talking about ‘Why is she in the bed holding the baby? Why she got a gown on? Why she acting like she just had a baby?’” Wade said. “And once again, people are uneducated on the process and why we decided to go skin to skin as soon as our baby came out.”
Union also shared that the couple planned to do skin-to-skin contact after the delivery to allow for the new baby to bond with her.
"It was easier to have a hospital gown to go skin-to-skin as opposed to the clothes I came in," Union explained. "When our surrogate's water broke, we already had a plan in place. It was a really long labor, so by the time the doctor decided to do a C-section, the cord was tied around her ankle. We had our own room from the time she was born. We all—our surrogate, our surrogate's husband, me, and my husband—we all had a chance to bond together. It took all of us to create her."
Last year, Union shared her struggles with infertility in her memoir We're Going to Need More Wine where she wrote about suffering up to nine miscarriages and the process of receiving numerous in vitro fertilization treatments.
“I have had eight or nine miscarriages,” Union wrote. “For three years, my body has been a prisoner of trying to get pregnant — I’ve either been about to go into an IVF cycle, in the middle of an IVF cycle or coming out of an IVF cycle.”
The actress initially did not want to have children, but after becoming a stepmom, she decided to try to conceive her and Wade's first child. Wade expressed in the interview the difficulties of watching his wife go through the IVF process. For the couple, deciding to choose a surrogate was the safest choice.
"I'm watching her do things to her body and to herself that it's getting to the point where it's not healthy," the point guard told Winfrey. "And as I always told her: 'I want this baby just as much as you do, but I married you, and you are the most important thing to me.' So it came to a point where, you know, I started to feel a certain way about that because I didn't want something to happen to her.'"
HuffPost reports that research shows bare skin-to-skin contact has multiple benefits for a newborn including bonding and lowering pain levels. Dr. Shannon M. Clark, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, explained its importance:
“The importance of skin to skin for intended parents is that the immediate benefits that can happen with the mom who just gave birth to her baby would be the same for an intended parent who didn’t give birth to a baby,” said Clark. “Being able to do that as an intended parent ― it’s ideal.”
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