Peru report: birth politics and the horizon of midwifery-based care

摘要

Peru's official birth model has become biomedicalised and out of line with the solid tradition of local and Andean community midwives. Over the past few decades, public health efforts have focused on the eradication of a less medicalised model of care, instead of its integration into the health system. Therefore, a more medicalised profession of midwifery now exists within the Peruvian birth model. However, the influence of foreign female doctors, lay midwives and professional midwives living and practising in the country for the past 30 years, together with the influence of the emergent Humanized Birth Movement (since 2000), has opened new possibilities for contemporary women wanting to birth their babies in a less medicalised and more natural and respectful way, both for them and their babies.