The life event I have chosen is birth because I spoke about it previously and I believe it is a major issue in Kenya. Childbirth is the most intimate and miraculous thing any person experiences. In this week’s lecture, we discussed the medicalization of childbirth. How we have switched from at home births to hospital ones over the years. Last week, a comment was left on my post asking if maybe Kenyan women prefer midwives over seeing OB-GYNs for childbirth? I found this question very intriguing and decided to address it in this post as it relates to the article.
In the article, Authoritative Knowledge by Briggite Jordan, he discusses how medicalized childbirth has become. He discusses a birthing scenario and how mothers have very little power in the room during childbirth. He discusses how even the woman said she needed to push, the woman was not aloud to until checked by the doctor. In a country where their beliefs and traditions are still held closely to their hearts, this may be very unappealing for many expecting Kenyan mothers. LArge amounts of children are delivered by unskilled community based birth attendants in Kenya. Most midwives in Kenya are used because they are a distance from health facilities and the midwives are trained by the people before them. There is no proper medical training most of the time for midwives. But, many Kenyan women have decided they prefer midwives over going to a health facility since Kenya made Maternal Healthcare free in 2013. According to the article, “Kenyan Women Returning to Traditional Birth Attendants” by Rael Ombuor many women prefer the care they receive from community based attendants. They speak about a specific women saying that women speak about her saying. “ She says we help them give birth with dignity. “ The medicalized system, where women have little control of their birth, may be very dehumanizing for Kenyan women who are used to community based attendants. Community based attendants are trusted by their communities to take care of mothers,.
According to the study, Culture and Birthing: Experiences from a Rural Community in Western Kenya, revealed that many women consider it a taboo to prepare for birth in ways such as buying clothes, purchase of birthing supplies like razor blade, setting aside money for delivery and deciding on where to deliver as they believe it will result in misfortunes. Its considered harmful to guess the sex of the baby or give a name or a gift to the unborn baby. These discourage women from making individual birthing plans, including delivery at a health facility. The attitude towards child birth in individual tribes is mainly positive, but when looking at individual patients depending on their societal status or age, they can be negatively looked upon in health care facilities. As well as men wanting to actively participate in the pregnancy and childbirth process, but in medicalized situations in Kenya, this may be frowned upon.
Ombuor, Rael. “Kenyan Women Returning to Traditional Birth Attendants.” Voice of America. Accessed July 20, 2019. https://www.voanews.com/africa/kenyan-women-returning-traditional-birth-attendants.
Rono, Abraham, Harisson Maithya, and Benard Sorre. “ Culture and Birthing: Experiences from a Rural Community in Western Kenya.” Culture and Birthing: Experiences from a Rural Community in Western Kenya, 2018. https://doi.org/10.13189/sa.2018.060105.
Thanks for answering my question! I really appreciate that, and I like where you went with this activity post. In your post you demonstrate there are positives and negatives with both Kenyan midwifery and Kenyan biomedicine. I wouldn’t discount the learned knowledge of the midwives though, it has been found by medical anthropologists that a lot of times the birthing methods used by midwifes in the global south are safer, less invasive and have higher rates of survivability then the hospitals.