“I know I was cut open, but I immediately forgot when I saw you”. Obstetric violence as a new framework to grant intelligibility to memories and experiences of childbirths in recent Argentina

Abstract

This article sets forth the issue of obstetric violence from the rising of a moral/ cognitive framework of reference which allows determining the meaning of violence in certain obstetric practices linked to childbirths. It is held that the memories and experiences of childbirths among cis women are being reconfigured since the emergence of the public arena linked to the right to humanized childbirth, in the context of the construction of gender violence as a public issue in recent Argentina. In the first place, key concepts from feminism and the anthropology of reproduction are applied once again so as to approach violence in analytical terms. Following, there is a description of the emergence of a public arena linked to the dispute for humanized childbirth, and the category of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2017) is resumed to put forward the construction of a new cognitive framework which grants intelligibility to the memories and experiences of cis women. To conclude, some cissexist bias are pointed out that reproduce the norms and groups for the humanization of childbirth.