Research

Obstetric violence—psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth—has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence: violence directed at women because they are women. My interest on this phenomenon emerged during my broader investigation on philosophy of childbirth which was conducted thanks to an ISF grant received in 2015.

Many women are affected by obstetric violence, with awful consequences. Until before this study, the phenomenon was mainly investigated by the health and social sciences, yet fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions had gone unnoticed. As a result, obstetric violence had not been clearly and effectively understood, delimited, or theoretically tackled. I proposed here a pioneering investigation that could offer a radically new understanding of obstetric violence. My novel hypothesis was that this is a distinct form of violence against women that cannot be adequately understood simply by labelling it as "gender violence." It is far more specific and complex. A key feature was that many violent obstetric practices had been normalized and were not yet recognized as violent.
 

The use of feminist philosophy in this investigation was methodologically justified on the premise that the existing lacunas in this field are mainly the product of gender blindness, – an ‘impossibility to know’ deriving particularly from gender prejudice and from a reluctance to understand central concepts in this field—such as health, violence, autonomy, control and risk— as being constructed through sexism and patriarchal values.