Postpartum Hotels are a Scam

It's a bad solution to an even worse problem.

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When I think of the perfect postpartum experience, I picture myself laying around for weeks in bed with my baby while we learn each other's secret language that brings us milk and sleep. My husband serves me bone broth and stew. My extended family plays outside with my children who feel loved and cared for. I don’t entertain guests, I don’t clean. I remain cocooned in dyad bliss until I feel nourished and strong enough to get to my feet. I’d spend no less than a month like this.

Of course, this is not the typical postpartum experience for most American mothers. Not even close.  One in four mothers return two weeks after giving birth. For working moms lucky enough to take a few months off after giving birth, their postpartum starts with getting rolled out of a hospital, after a number of sleepless nights of having their babies monitored, poked, jabbed, weighed, and a stern warning to never put a baby in your bed. Then there’s the in-laws to host, the other children to care for, the photos to send everyone, and then the crushing feeling of watching your husband return to work —and not even a drop of bone broth. After the months spent fretting on which wallpaper to put in the nursery or which bluetooth video monitor to buy, new moms quickly find themselves overwhelmed and incredulous. 

Some would say our country’ maternity care is corrupt and broken and it would take radical paradigm shift to place birth and postpartum. 

Others would look at this problem and see a “hole in the market” and a “business opportunity.” 

Enter luxury postpartum hotels like Boram, Ahma&Co, and Sanhu house. All claim to take their cues from Eastern traditions (such as sanhujori) , that require new mothers to stay in bed for 30 days while her family cooks hearty meals, cleans her house, brews medicinal teas, massage her, and basically mother her while she mothers her child. The modern twist? You get this sort of treatment for one week, by strangers, and for $1,500 a night. 

And people say late-stage capitalism is heartless. 😏

These hotel stays are branded as ‘postnatal retreats’. They first emerged in major cities in South Korea, Japan, and China, where these ancient traditions that were once practiced throughout generations started to break down as families became more atomized and moved further away from each other. Starting in the early Aughts, these retreats and centers, we’re fairly barebones but still acknowledged that women needed a soft landing and transition between birth and motherhood. Over the last 20 years, they’ve scaled up and now offer complete course in luxury with doulas, room service, massages, yoga, parenting classes, ‘feeding’ support, mother’s lounges, and of course, nurseries. 

Hotel conglomerates like Waldorf-Astoria and start-up entrepreneurs, are getting in on the action state side. 

“Well be your village,” says Boram’s website, a postpartum center which is located on the ninth floor of the five-star Langham Hotel in New York City. 

Boram, and similar centers around the U.S. focus on feeding the mothers, pampering, and attending to all the needs of the mother, sometimes at the exclusion of her baby.

In almost all “review” type articles about a stay at Boram, the mom suffered from a long and traumatic birth and praises the center for being a safe and comfortable place she could recover.  

Moms who reviewed Boram on Tik Tok all seemed to love one thing the best: the nursery, where the baby sleeps “all night” with doulas that watch the baby while you have “date nights”. This sort of separation can have devastating consequences for the mom’s milk supply and normalizes the very abnormal practice of sleeping away from your newborn. Even if you don’t send you baby to the nursery, all rooms come equipped with a ‘hospital grade bassinet’.

Daycare is Normalized But it Ain't Normal

In our culture, the focus of postpartum is squarely on the infant and not the mother, so these retreats are certainly trying to compensate for that.  All of these offerings are focused on the mother and suggest that the best way for her to rest and recover is that she takes some time away from her newborn.