Paper short abstract:

Obstetric violence is a recent term used to broadly describe dehumanizing treatment and abuse of medicalization in the birthing process. This paper explores global, national, and personal discourses of obstetric violence risk within the context of maternal and familial decision-making in Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

Obstetric violence legislation in Argentina reflects the fairly recent flurry of gender policies being implemented as a result of social mobilization around gender equity with new and established women's rights groups at the forefront. Obstetric violence refers to acts by which health personnel engage in dehumanizing treatment, abuse of medicalization, and pathologizing of the birthing process (Chiarotti, 2010). Argentina is only one of two Latin American countries to have implemented laws against obstetric violence: Venezuela in 2007 and Argentina in 2009. A central component of obstetric violence in Argentina includes extremely high Caesarian-Section rates there; it ranks seventh globally in unnecessary Caesarians (Gibbons et al., 2010). Through fieldwork conducted in 2014-15, I argue that the Argentine medical system has embraced and routinized this practice partly as a project of modernity, where medical intervention denotes technological progress in the management of otherwise unpredictable pregnant bodies. That it has become so familiar to some medical practitioners and pregnant women alike, has made the non-medicalized birth seem strange, archaic, and relegated to those who are not modern, White, middle-class subjects. These women in Argentina are most visible as Bolivian immigrants who are marginalized as racialized indigenous Others (e.g., "peasant," "ignorant," "poor"). Activists who have rallied to establish the obstetric violence legislation, however, are largely White middle/upper class women who, in their attempts to promote humanistic (non-medicalized) birth, are also prone to othering through discourses of risk and exoticism of indigenous women and their birthing practices.