Abstract
I conducted ethnographic field work and analyzed divergent meanings and practices towards child-rearing and respectful maternity care during childbirth workshops in a rural district in the province of Buenos Aires. These public and cost-free initiatives’ expected results were not fully achieved. Participants were recruited with little success. I therefore use the term nominalists to refer to the women that did attend the workshops, spaces where it is asserted that women must become one with their “babies” in order to later search for “spaces of autonomy”. They distinguish themselves from the majority of women that do not attend the workshops. For the “nominalists”, these latter women do not pay much attention to the processes of childbirth and childrearing, which they would conceive as being “natural”. This case shows that not everyone is “intrinsically” for “respectful maternity care”.
Keywords:
gender; rural; labour childbirth workshops; maternity