Does the term ‘obstetric violence’ obscure the harms resulting from the promotion of ‘normal births’?
“The words being used set an agenda that casts obstetricians as perpetrators.”
This was obstetrician Dr Vijay Roach. He was writing in 2023 during a mass of media headlines about birth trauma experienced by women and the claim that they had been victims of ‘obstetric violence’.
The phrase hurt. As Dr Roach, a former RANZCOG president, went on to say, the term carries a logic that there is someone inflicting this violence, that they are doing so with deliberate intent to harm.
A few weeks before, Professor Hannah Dahlen, a prominent midwifery academic at Western Sydney University, had fronted the NSW parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma, where she said, based on a major Australian survey, some 11% of women had been subjected to ‘obstetric violence’.
