Maternity Violence Must Whither for Safe Mother and Safe Child

Abstract

Introduction: It is essential that all pregnant women get quality and dignified care. But it does not seem to be happening. Although there is no consensus on what constitutes respectful or disrespectful care, emerging respectful maternity care (RMC) movement has mission of trying women centered, evidence based, and quality maternity care. Objectives: To collect information about burden of disrespectful care, interventions during pregnancy, birth, post birth which seem to violate woman’s rights, and are likely to affect woman’s life negatively, physically and mentally. Material and Methodology: Various studies related to maternity care were looked into by using search engines like Google scholar, NCBI, Pub med, upto, date etc. There were no inclusion or exclusion criteria for studies, reviews. Whatever was available was looked into. Local, national and international opinions were also searched and added. Self-experiences too were added. Results: Globally women’s health rights advocates have reported that disrespect and abuse during reproductive health care, especially to marginalized women who have limited resources, is widespread. What constitutes disrespectful and abusive care is really not clear but lack of privacy, non-consensual care, verbal, physical abuse, neglect or abandonment, detainment for non-payment of fees and so on seem to be part of every-day care. So how much is the burden is also lacking. So globally researchers are working on finding extent of disrespectful, abusive (D and A) maternity care. Conclusion: There is still no consensus on what constitutes, respectful or disrespectful, maternity care but whatever is believed to be disrespectful seems to be widespread global issue. It is essential that better designed studies are conducted. Studies need to incorporate cultural knowledge, responsiveness of health system, and health policies for delivery of quality maternal care with respect.