Capturing women’s voices: lived experiences of incivility during childbirth in the United States

ABSTRACT

Increasing research has improved global awareness of mistreatment during childbirth. However, research primarily focuses on “higher-intensity” mistreatment during childbirth, and largely focuses on women outside the United States (U.S.). We address these gaps by exploring the phenomenology of incivility, a “lower-intensity” mistreatment, experienced by women during childbirth in the U.S. We used a combination of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and thematic analysis to analyze the qualitative responses (N = 200) of experiences of incivility during childbirth. We identified nine primary themes of incivility: lack of empathy, denial/minimization, ignoring, pressure, privacy issues, breastfeeding/formula issues, identity-based, uncomfortable physical interactions, and silencing. Results demonstrate incivility is critical to consider as a form of mistreatment in childbirth because it violates respect. The results help nuance the understanding of how mistreatment is experienced in childbirth. Results also demonstrate unique manifestations of incivility were shaped by the sociopolitical context of the U.S. Implications for policy development and health outcomes are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Childbirth
• incivility
• mistreatment
• obstetric violence
• United States
• women

Acknowledgments

During the period of manuscript preparation, E.A.V. was funded by the T32 Research Training Program in Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention at Northwestern University, Department of Preventive Medicine.

Data availability statement

The subset of data used in the current study are available upon request.

Disclosure statement

E.A.V has received a grant outside the submitted work by the National Institutes of Health, during the peer review process. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, exclusively internal funding from the University of Michigan to complete this research.