Respectful Maternity Care: The Universal Rights of Childbearing Women
This article focuses on the different disrespects and abuses that women experience during her maternity care and tries to address it through raising awareness of childbearing women’s inclusion in the guarantees of human rights, increasing the capacity of maternal health advocates to participate in the human rights processes, aligning the childbearing women’s sense of entitlement to high-quality maternity care, and providing basis for holding the maternal care system and communities accountable to these rights.
The article’s major key ideas are as follows:
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Pregnancy and childbirth are momentous events in the lives of women and their families and it is a time of intense vulnerability, thus care and respect must be provided.
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Safe motherhood is a concept usually restricted to physical safety of the mother and the child, however the article argued that it must be expanded beyond the prevention of morbidity and mortality to incorporate respect for women’s basic human rights including respect for women’s autonomy, dignity, feelings, choices, and preferences.
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Disrespect and abuse of women seeking maternity care is becoming an urgent problem and creating a growing community of concern that spans the domain of healthcare research, quality, and education; human rights; and civil right advocacy.
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Bowser and Hill (2010), summarized the seven major categories of disrespect and abuse that childbearing women experience during the provision of maternity care. These categories overlap and occur in a continuum from subtle disrespect and humiliation to overt violence.
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Summary of the disrespect and abuse experience by childbearing women and the corresponding rights violated
Reference:
White Ribbon Alliance. (2011). Respectful maternity care: The universal rights of childbearing women. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/woman_child_accountability/ierg/reports/2012_01S_Respectful_Maternity_Care_Charter_The_Universal_Rights_of_Childbearing_Women.pdf