Instituting Care: Reproductive Health Governance and the Ethics of Humanizing Birth in Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This project set out to understand how the paradigm of 'humanized birth' is implemented in Salvador, Brazil, through Rede Cegonha, a government program to improve maternal and infant healthcare in Brazil's public health system. Over the course of twelve-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, the project followed Rede Cegonha from the federal Ministry of Health to the local health secretariats, maternity care services, and communities of Salvador, Bahia to answer the question: How does a public policy humanize childbirth? In spite of economic, political, and public health crises, as well as persistent fragilities in the public health system, government agents and healthcare professionals negotiate daily the incitements to humanize their practices. Women of all socioeconomic levels have begun to question the prevailing, medicalized models of birth, and to revindicate their rights to respectful treatment in maternity care services. Overall, the fieldwork underscored how birth's state of crisis in Brazil is undergoing a paradigmatic shift while being subject to economic and political precarity that threaten women's access to timely, respectful perinatal care. It also revealed that projects to shift the ethics of childbirth are intricately bound up with much broader projects of social and political life in contemporary Brazil.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

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Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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