The Hospital delivery in Latin America: pathologization, medicalization and instrumentalization practices

Abstract

The pathologization of the female body that gives birth, its medicalization and the increasing instrumentalization exerted on it, are concrete practices that unfold the conglomerate of modern-capitalist ways of doing and thinking about birth in Latin America. The text outlines a reflection on the term that has been built with the eagerness to account and denounce violent practices previously mentioned on a pregnant woman, which births and goes into puerperium: obstetric violence. It has been converted to the eighteenth century and the befall of the industrial era as the event that provides explanation for the practices mentioned above (Mangnone Alemán, 2013: 79). The text questions such statement and proposes a link in between the establishment of the logic of capital accumulation in the Latin-American region, emerged on the xvi and xvii centuries, and the exercise of the pathological practices, medicalization and instrumentalization of birth carried out nowadays.