The country in question where this occurred was Mexico. The first occasion was when we visited our nearest local public healthcare center for initial guidance. I was stunned when I was denied entry on the grounds that entry is limited to the patients themselves to reduce the risk of COVID. Normally, I would understand this, but I feel an exception should be made in the case of pregnancy, since the child will be just as much mine as my wife's. However, since it is a facility that doesn't specialize in pregnancies, I was able to calm myself by rationalizing that surely the healthcare center staff lacked awareness of the importance of including fathers in prenatal appointments.

The main reason for the visit was for us to seek to have my wife referred to the prestigious National Institute of Perinatology, since her pregnancy has certain high-risk factors making it appropriate for her to receive care at a specialty healthcare facility, which of course increased my desire to accompany her to all her appointments to make sure that no questions were left unanswered and that she didn't have to bear the full burden and stress of remembering all the information.

At some point, some authority figure (perhaps the security guard at the neighborhood health center, but I honestly can't recall) led us to believe that I would be allowed to attend appointments at the National Institute of Perinatology with my wife. After all, for her to be registered and admitted, we had to provide a considerable load of documentation for both her as the patient and myself as the "responsible party" (including my birth certificate, which I had to have shipped from abroad at a considerable cost to make sure it arrived on time), so it only seemed reasonable to me that I would be allowed to accompany my wife, otherwise why demand all this documentation of me? We might as well have saved ourselves the trouble with the paperwork and expedited shipping costs by having her pretend to be a single mother-to-be.

Needless to say, today was the day of her appointment at Perinatology and I was denied entry. We woke up at 5 a.m., traveled halfway across the city, waited in the cold as the Institute took its sweet time to let people in, and I had to risk losing almost a whole day of work, only to be denied entry, as if the child to be weren't my kid too. I thought that a specialty healthcare institute like the one in question would be more enlightened about including fathers in the prenatal process, but alas, no.

I was and still am enraged at the situation. I find it so insulting that I am treated as an "infection risk" rather than one of the two primary interested parties worthy of respect, consideration, and support. It's so dehumanizing! Society doesn't even have the decency to wait for kids to be born before starting the process of devaluing their fathers for the rest of their lives. In light of all the paperwork I had to provide without the having the right to attend the appointments, I am getting an early, bitter taste of how fatherhood means bearing the responsibilities of parenthood without enjoying the corresponding rights of it. They're treating me like a sperm donor.

Am I overreacting? Also, has anyone else experienced this?
Thanks for reading my rant of the day!

P.S.: Two other facilities (the private clinic where my wife received her first ultrasound and the lab where she received her second ultrasound) did let me participate and treated me with respect, so I will give them the credit they deserve (and both facilities were run entirely by women). However, I believe that fathers-to-be should be able to attend the prenatal appointments of the mothers-to-be of their children as a right, and not based on the whims of the people running any given healthcare facility.