Selling Beautiful Births: The Use of Evidence by Brazil’s Humanised Birth Movement

Excerpt

Maternal health care continues to be excessively medicalised in many national health systems. Global, national, and local level policy initiatives seek to normalise low-risk birth and optimise the use of clinical interventions, informed by strong evidence supporting care that is centred on women’s preferences and needs. Challenges remain in translating evidence into practice in settings where care is primarily clinician-led and hospital-based, such as in Brazil.

I conducted an ethnography of the movement for humanised care in childbirth in São Paulo between 2015 and 2018. I draw on interviews and focus groups with movement members (including mothers, doulas, midwives, obstetricians, politicians, programme leads, and researchers), and observations in health facilities implementing humanised protocols, state health council meetings, and key policy fora (including conferences, campaigning events, and social media). Key actors in this movement have been involved in the development and implementation of evidence-based policy programmes to “humanise” childbirth. Scientific evidence is used strategically alongside rights-based language, such as “obstetric violence”, to legitimise moral and ideological aims. When faced with resistance from pro-c-section doctors, movement members make use of other strategies to improve access to quality care, such as stimulating demand for humanised birth in the private health sector. In Brazil, this has led to a greater public awareness of the risks of the excessive medicalisation of birth but can reinforce existing inequalities in access to high-quality maternity care. Lessons might be drawn that have wider relevance in settings where policymakers are trying to reduce iatrogenic harm from unnecessary interventions in childbirth and for supporters of normal birth working to reduce barriers to access to midwifery-led, woman-centred care.