Tribune. For twenty years, the claims and unease of midwives have resurfaced in the public debate more and more frequently. Women’s profession (they were 97.3% in 2017) devoted exclusively to the health of women and their toddlers, their motherhood, but also their sexuality and their life, they pay dearly for this redundancy of the feminine in the services rendered to women. So many gender inequalities that can be seen throughout their professional activity, since “Gender is a primary way of signifying power relations”, as the feminist Joan Scott writes (“Gender: a useful category of historical analysis”, The GRIF Notebooks, spring 1988).
For midwives, this means low salaries, little institutional recognition, the subordination of their practice to pathology in hospitals, the restriction of their autonomy with the restriction of places of birth in the hospital, the status quo for to achieve the universitarization of training, and the glass ceiling for research in maieutics, their specialty. Thus, through their demands, a whole process of emancipation of women and of social changes that have taken place is spelled out, except that, for them, specifically, all this remains expected.
Your chauvinist
This is why the report of the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS) aimed at advising government arbitrations on the evolution of the profession was highly anticipated, and for a very long time. Its experts, although having auditioned many of these women, nonetheless flower the spirit of the libido dominandi, according to the expression of Pierre Bourdieu (Male domination, Paris, Threshold, 1978); the one who emerges from any dominant social group with regard to women. Obviously, the authors of the report, taken by the obligation of an empirical observation concerning the gender inequalities supported by midwives, set, in note 40, page 22, the tone of a machismo which could not be held back any longer. Thus, through the voices of gynecologists, a male vision of the world is brilliantly revealed when it is written: “However, gynecologists represent medical, intellectual and moral authority, build knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth and define the principle of operation of maternity hospitals. “
Neither slip, nor failed act, nor even clumsiness, in this declaration, but the implacable proclamation of the persistence of a patriarchate which wants to impose its own conception of what is involved in the autonomy of midwives and , hence, those of women. Because make no mistake, the emancipation of midwives hides the possible emancipation of women. That of their health as well as the reappropriation of birth, taking into account their own knowledge, skills and resources, without any stigmatization by pathology or risk. So that the demands of midwives join those of women for alternative places of birth, with birth centers, support for home births and health care pathways in the follow-up of women, independent of the care pathways. negative connotations that are centered on the absence of pathology.
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