Abstract
In the midst of the humanization movement for childbirth and birth in Brazil, doulas and perinatal educators have been appropriating certain biomedical knowledge and combining it with “traditional” or “alternative” knowledge around childbirth. In the past decade, many of them come to speak openly about obstetric violence and to legitimize the right of women to narrate the suffering experienced, composing another paradigma of care, articulated to a conter-hegemonic reproductive pedagogy. From an intersectional view, we propose to think of the doulage associated with perinatal education as a practice of problematizing the more general cultural assumptions around which the current reproductive hierarchies and the hegemonic obstetric model are organized. We suggest that the present contribution makes it possible to broaden the debate on reproductive governance beyond the liberal foundation of the sexual and reproductive rights paradigm, in order to accommodate the premises of the struggle for reproductive justice.
Keywords:
reproductive hierarchies; obstetric violence; doula; perinatal education