Seeking control over birth in the Middle East

In this chapter, we explore the changing context of birth in Jordan and the Middle East, now and in the past. This chapter illustrates how birth has changed – moving from home to public hospitals, and now for some women with sufficient financial resources, to private hospitals that offer anaesthesia or sedation in labour as a means of escaping a highly traumatic birthing system. Birth, in the Middle East, has moved from being in a place of comfort and care to a place where women are violated and their need for respect, support, medicated or non-medicated pain relief and privacy during birth is disregarded. Unfortunately, to escape this, women are turning to private hospitals where they have the option to purchase some privacy, some continuity and sedation to give birth. The disrespect women face in both public and private care is deeply embedded in a maternity system dominated by medicine and associated patriarchal cultural practices and beliefs. This chapter also demonstrates that it is not only in the Middle East that women’s needs are being disregarded. There is a global problem when it comes to providing humanised maternity care or listening to women. We need, as a world, to work together to fix this now so future generations do not need to face the same birth trauma.