“You didn’t cry while doing it”: obstetric violence and its expressions

Abstract

The study aims to analyze obstetric violence and its various expressions from the perspective of postpartum women. Captured through semi-structured interviews with 12 postpartum women accompanied by a Basic Health Unit in a municipality in northeastern Brazil, the questions were about the socio-economic profile, the experience of childbirth, and the perception they had about obstetric violence. We identified that obstetric violence is recurrent in-hospital care and expresses inequalities and oppression in gender relations and between professionals and users of health services. The confrontation of obstetric violence demands to give greater visibility to this problem, including it in the training processes and the workspaces of these professionals, as well as among women, in an attempt to provide the identification and confrontation of this form of violence.