Paper short abstract:

This paper explores local narratives and social dynamics around water birth, from a retrospective standpoint in respect to a Portuguese public hospital. This hospital suspended water birth due to lack of evidence on the overall safety and risks involved.

Paper long abstract:

Water birth was a viable option in Portugal in one public hospital (Hospital de São Bernardo, in Setúbal) within the National Healthcare System, since 2009. Five years later, the Hospital's Administration Board decided to suspend water birth, with the support of the National Medical Association. "Lack of scientific evidence" was the motto. Navigating through the turbulent waters of international "scientific" recommendations on childbirth from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics in the United States to the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the United Kingdom, opinions on water birth differ. Some women from all over the country have chosen to deliver in Setúbal, defying some standardized practices such as delivering in their home´s nearest hospital and the lithotomy position, and, then, the overall "morally required routine" (Jordan 1978:2). Now, practitioners are telling them they did put "at risk" their selves and their babies. As anthropologists try to debate the very ontology of risk as a biomedical category shaping healthcare routines, maternal healthcare professionals aim to halter the effects of over-medicalized birth care, providing systematized data with scientific biomedical value. We thus collide in a "risky" terrain that we both want to improve. Within a public healthcare perspective, how should we ultimately address actual practices of risk management on maternal healthcare? This paper explores local narratives and social dynamics around water birth, from a retrospective standpoint, rather than ethnographic, in respect to Hospital de São Bernardo.