It is normal in the us for it to be done in labor

Sadly, yes it is normal. With both deliveries, I filled out pre-admission paperwork, but still had to sign a bunch of stuff (I got the privacy policy, I know how the payment works and agree I’m responsible for what my insurance doesn’t cover, consent stuff, etc., etc., etc.) when I was actually admitted.

As far as I can tell, the pre-registration is just so they can anticipate how many mothers might be planning to come in around a certain time, give or take.

Or maybe it’s just a joke entirely.

Yeah, not sure why, but I did all of my preregistration and then went into the hospital in labor and they proceeded to ask me a million inane questions that I could’ve easily answered beforehand. It was four hours from showing up to the hospital and crowning, so I was going pretty fast, in a lot of pain, and did it all naturally. Needless to say, it’s not easy to answer questions like “what is your highest level of education completed” while dilating. My husband finally had to take over answering for me. I signed two consent forms–one for myself, one for the baby–when I first checked in.

I would’ve loved to have had a nurse who would’ve seen that I was a little preoccupied and my education level wasn’t going to change in the next 24 hours.

I pre-registered as I had my pre-natal appointments there too, But when they started asking me questions (I needed to start pushing as soon as I was in the L&D) I snaped at them ‘its all in my orange pregnancy record that my husband has, where is he?!’ Only to find out the desk person wasn’t letting him in becasue he was a little tipsy (we’d been at a birthday dinner and bub was 8 days early…) once I got mad at them they quickly let him in and its all a bit of a blur in my memory after that… then I had to get the maternity ward nurses to find the same paperwork later, as it included my scans and I wanted to keep them, nurses hadn’t thought of that…