“More Human”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Humanization of Birth in Bahia, Brazil

• In Event: Aspirations to National Health: Social Medicine and Political Subjectivity in Latin America

Abstract

Childbirth in Brazil has been a target of policy intervention now for decades. In recent years, maternal and infant health advocates have succeeded in placing birth care reform at the center of the federal policy agenda. They helped to usher in the Rede Cegonha (Stork Network) program, inaugurated in 2011. Rede Cegonha aims to improve care in prenatal, birth, and postpartum in the SUS, Brazil’s universal public health system. To this end, one of its primary aims is to “humanize” birth, promoting family-centered care with as little medical intervention as possible. In policy documents and everyday speech, humanization is often mobilized as a common-sense term, one that requires no definition because its meaning is obvious. Yet, as I contend in this paper, humanization presupposes a particular version of the human—one that rests on a set of racialized and gender essentialist assumptions about the significance of birth and what it means to care in labor and delivery.

This paper analyzes Rede Cegonha as an instance of what I call affective policy—policy that operates on the cultivation of particular feelings. Yet the feelings produced are not always the desired ones. Examining how women in Salvador—primarily Black and low income—engaged with the new paradigms promoted by the federal government, I show that they often viewed low-intervention birth care as a form of state abandonment, yet another manifestation of their exclusion from the constitutional right to health.

Author

• K. Eliza Williamson, Rice University