CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Peterson, Nora Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Title | De Facto Feminism: An Analysis of the Respectful Childbirth Movement in Hungary |
| Summary | Like many countries around the world, Hungary has adopted the western biomedical model of medicine as the primary method of providing healthcare services to its nationals. The adoption of this model of medical care has spurred a proliferation of systematic mistreatment of women during facility-based childbirth—a phenomenon known as obstetric violence and understood to be physically and/or psychologically violent acts perpetrated by healthcare personnel against pregnant women and their fetuses/infants during pregnancy and childbirth. In response to this proliferation of violence, counter movements, known as respectful childbirth movements, that promote alternative models to the technological model of birth proponed in biomedicine have developed throughout the world. These models seek to re-center women at the locus of childbirth by employing the principles fundamental to the midwifery model of care. The academic discourse surrounding respectful childbirth movements derives primarily from a rich legacy of feminist scholarship on medicalization in the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States. However, this legacy of scholarship does not properly account for the experiences of women who have lived under distinct material and cultural conditions, such as the women living in contemporary post-communist Hungary, where the development of women’s activism has faced particular challenges and where the high profile legal cases surrounding childbirth rights in Hungary—namely, the cases brought against obstetrician/midwife Ágnes Geréb and Ternovszky v. Hungary—have dramatically shaped the ways in which respectful childbirth movements are framed in Hungary. The aim of this thesis is to expand the conversation surrounding respectful childbirth movements in order to include a more pluralistic understanding of what respectful childbirth movements can look like outside the hegemonic disocurse of the United States. |
| Supervisor | Sandor, Judit; Ortiz Gomez, Teresa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/peterson_nora.pdf |
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