Research Update

Regarding my research, it’s going well so far. I’m absolute positive that whatever I do in life I want it to involve maternity. There is no doubt about that. I’ve discovered some really interesting things about midwifery in Argentina and the healthcare system (at least I find them interesting :D if you don’t, feel free to skip this part):

For starters, the public healthcare system is free for both Argentineans and foreigners. You don’t have to be a citizen to get free treatment in a public hospital. WHOA! Crazy, right! There are so many foreigners who come to Argentina to get treated because of this. It’s just not fair though, for example, cause Chileans flood the Argentinean hospitals (paying nothing towards it of course), but Argentineans don’t get that same benefit or treatment when they’re in Chile. And healthcare is divided into different parts. There’s public healthcare, which is government paid. Everything is free and you’ll always get treated, but if you need a surgery for example, you go on a waitlist. Then there’s private healthcare, which is divided into obra social (paid for through your job) and prepaid, which you pay for individually. In both of those, you go to private clinics. Essentially, which type of healthcare you have is determined by how rich you are. Wealthy people don’t use the public hospitals even though they pay for it through taxes.

So that was healthcare system background. In regard to midwifery, there are several interesting paradigms and current phenomena:

1) Midwifery is based on the principles of more personalized maternity experience and natural delivery and birthing with no drugs, whereas obstetricians focus on induced labor, making the delivery as quick as possible, and they use drugs. However, in Argentina, the majority of midwives work in hospitals and in the hospitals you have to use drugs, so midwifery has lost the essential of what it is.

2) The government tried to eradicate midwifery in the 1950’s-70’s so that only the professions of doctor and nurse remained and they banned home births. Doctors used the fact that some out-of-work midwives started doing abortions (which was illegal) to discredit the profession and make people not respect them. Eradicating the profession failed so the government eventually brought back its midwifery programs, but ironically, nowadays doctors are the ones doing illegal abortions. Because of this attempt to eradicate, there are now some provinces in Argentina where midwifery is gone- those programs never reopened.

3) The less autonomous midwives are (which it’s not common to find autonomous ones here), the less they can do. Autonomous midwives can do anything: they practice continuous care, they deliver the baby in a home, and they determine their own schedule; however, if a pregnancy becomes complicated and she has to go to the hospital with her patient, the midwife loses all her powers and autonomy and becomes merely a doula. Midwives in the public and private hospitals have to work in conjunction with a doctor and don’t have the same abilities. Public hospital midwives don’t practice continuous care, they share the pressure with doctors during complicated pregnancies, and they work in shifts, doing also family planning and sex education. In private hospitals, midwives aren’t allowed to deliver babies and they function more like nurses. They do parent classes and inducements/drug injections.

4) There’s a phenomenon of increased student interest in the profession of midwifery. Education is not as good for medicine nowadays because there are sooooo many students interested in becoming a doctor. There are more doctors that needed doctors. Frustrated medical students are changing career paths to midwifery because it’s very similar, and nursing students are becoming midwives because they’ve finished the nursing track and want to do more.