Obstetric violence: a new framework for identifying challenges to maternal healthcare in Argentina

Abstract

Argentina has recognized women's right to not be subjected to obstetric violence, the violence exercised by health personnel on the body and reproductive processes of pregnant women, as expressed through dehumanizing treatment, medicalization abuse, and the conversion of natural processes of reproduction into pathological ones. Argentina's legislative decision to frame this abuse and mistreatment of women under the rubric of gender-based violence permits the identification of failures in both the healthcare system and women's participation in society. This article examines how applying the Violence Against Women framework to address issues of abuse and mistreatment of women during maternal health care provides a beneficial approach for analyzing such embedded structural problems from public health, human rights, and ethics perspectives. The framework of Violence Against Women seeks to transform existing harmful cultural practices, not only through the protection of women's reproductive autonomy, but also through the empowerment of women's participation in society.

Measuring mistreatment of women during childbirth: a review of terminology and methodological approaches

“…Another challenge is establishing criteria for different forms of mistreatment that allow for the comparison of mistreatment between study sites, while also capturing the nuances of mistreatment unique to each location and study population. Critics have noted that the Bowser and Hill definitions and Latin American obstetric violence laws do not sufficiently specify what acts constitute abusive care [ 3 , 27 ]. Without specific typology included in the category definitions, researchers using the disrespect and abuse categories have used different criteria and study methodologies to determine what constitutes physical abuse or non-dignified care, for example, and thus the comparability of studies has been limited [ 3 ].…”

Parto e nascimento na região rural: a violência obstétrica

“…5 In a study on humanized delivery, only 48% of women chose the delivery position, but this number is still negligible , considering the autonomy of the woman. 15 In the study presented here, the largest portion of deliveries occurred in the dorsal decubitus, which again demonstrates a failure in care, since, according to the Ministry of Health, the recommendation of vertical positions during labor assists in the descent of the baby and consequent progression of labor. It is notorious, in this sense, that there is a lack of orientation and clarification of these women.…”

Obstetric Violence as Reproductive Governance in the Dominican Republic

“…Participants also conceptualized buena atención (good attention) through a medicalized perspective, in which standards for quality care depended on perceptions of timeliness and effectiveness of service delivery, rather than on factors such as privacy or the demeanor of medical personnel. These findings are shared with various research studies throughout the world that have documented cases in which different forms of mistreatment become normalized to the extent that women or health providers do not view these as abusive (Castro and Erviti 2003;Grigoryan et al 2015;McMahon et al 2014). To our knowledge, Freedman and colleagues have proposed the only framework that accounts for deviations between researchers' definitions of mistreatment and women and medical personnel's perspectives of those issues (Freedman et al 2014;Freedman and Kruk 2014).…”