Understanding contested women’s rights in development: the Latin American campaign for the humanisation of birth and the challenge of midwifery in Mexico

Hanna Laako

Third World Quarterly, 2017, vol. 38, issue 2, 379-396

Abstract: This article builds on the recent debates on human rights and development to discuss the case of reproductive rights and midwifery activism as part of the broader mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence in Latin America and Mexico. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the analysis shows how human rights continue to form a significant contentious and constructed terrain among women in the global South. The mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence indicates how the clinical developmental view of reproductive rights is challenged by these activists as not necessarily safeguarding the rights of women during birth. In Mexico this campaign is essentially linked to the struggle to bring back and strengthen midwifery as a way of ensuring improved human rights in birth. The article concludes, however, that this campaign might be challenged by Indigenous rights in the near future.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2016.1145046 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:38:y:2017:i:2:p:379-396

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2016.1145046

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().