Contribution short abstract:

This presentation examines how humour is used as a coping mechanism among several tactics by women at the face of obstetrical violence in the highly medicalized childbirth practices in contemporary Turkey based on a qualitative sociological research.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation examines how humour can become a part of a coping mechanism in childbirth practices, considering the perspectives of mothers, doctors, midwives, and doulas. The qualitative sociological research is based on in-depth interviews with 40 mothers, with differing ages, spanning various social classes, socio-professional status and educational levels, who gave birth in private and public hospitals or at home, via vaginal delivery or c-section, over the past 30 years.

Officially formulated in 2007 in Venezuela, obstetric violence refers in general to disrespectful, non-consented care and abusive treatment of women by healthcare providers as well as a failure to adhere to evidence-based care, along with professional authoritarianism and sexist attitudes towards women.

Various mistreatments as well as medically unjustified interventions in the lack of consent by women during their childbirth are fragments of obstetrical violence. This research is an attempt to make visible women’s action (and refusal of action) and make audible their voices (and their silences) in their struggle for comfort, dignity and autonomy in the face of physical, verbal or psychological violence, in a context of absence of organized and overt resistance. Instead of portraying women as passive objects of medical surveillance, it is important to take into account the fact that women are active participants with some level of power whether they respond to reproductive technologies via assimilation, compliance or resistance.

Ignoring, oblivion and silence may become forms of coping with the authoritarian modes of governing women’s bodies. As silence may act as a means of coping with traumatic birth memories, humour becomes another way of dealing with the violence and the memory of that violence. For instance, in their narrative women who have witnessed some forms of mistreatment related with their birth would either cry or laugh telling that experience.