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The cul­ture of obstet­ri­cal risk and active man­age­ment of labour led a whole gen­er­a­tion of women to loose con­fi­dence in their innate abil­i­ty to birth their baby. A grow­ing num­ber of pro­fes­sion­al birth atten­dants (doc­tors and mid­wives) are now try­ing to step out of this “pro­duc­tivist” mod­el. How­ev­er, only well-informed users have the poten­tial to fos­ter a rad­i­cal change of med­ical prac­tice with the sup­port of law-makers.

This year’s top­ic will be “Time for Birth.”

It will cov­er many aspects of the “indus­tri­al” obstet­ri­cal care: the pho­bia of post-term preg­nan­cy, induc­tion and “active man­age­ment” of labour, rup­tur­ing mem­branes, imme­di­ate sec­tion of the chord etc.

We need to break the spell on this process by talk­ing about time in a pos­i­tive man­ner: the essen­tial time it takes (or we ought to claim back) for birthing, both in the phys­i­cal and in the psy­chic sense.

We invite par­ents, birth atten­dants, health pro­fes­sion­als and all con­cerned cit­i­zens to cam­paign for this top­ic, ide­al­ly dur­ing the 15–21 May peri­od. A few ideas: 

1. sup­ply­ing more links and doc­u­ments on this top­ic for the web pages and databases;
2. com­ment­ing on exist­ing resources;
3. sug­gest­ing actions for indi­vid­ual, infor­mal groups, non-prof­it soci­eties, pro­fes­sion­al agen­cies and media in var­i­ous countries;
4. broad­cast­ing infor­ma­tion on the media;
5. giv­ing access to infor­ma­tion to preg­nant women (social wel­fare office, gath­er­ings of moth­ers…) and teenagers;
6. arrang­ing meet­ings, con­fer­ences, inter­views with the local press or radio;
7. orga­niz­ing all sorts of satel­lite events;
8. trans­lat­ing the avail­able mate­r­i­al to more languages…

WRCW (SMAR in French) is launched at the ini­tia­tive of Alliance Fran­coph­o­ne pour l’Ac­couche­ment Respec­té <https://afar.info>.

We invite you to vis­it last year’s web pages in Eng­lish and Spanish: 

https://afar.info/smar2005/index-en.html
https://afar.info/smar2005/index-es.html