Representação social do parto nos relatos de mulheres adeptas do Movimento pela Humanização

Abstract

This research seeks to explore the meanings attributed to the experience of childbirth and shared by the Humanization Birth Movement in Brazil. This Movement stands out in the Brazilian scenario of childbirth proposing new paradigms for the childbirth care attributing to the parturient the protagonist role. Among the Movements fronts of action, the internet has proven to be an important tool for disseminating the principles and values that integrate the ideology of the humanization of childbirth. In this context, the dissemination in the virtual space of testimonies of women adherents of this ideal and who have experienced humanized childbirth themselves has shown to be a common practice. We investigated the published reports of childbirth by five organizations which were recognized as influential to the Movement. 152 childbirth reports were selected for the formation of the corpus of the research. The corpus was submitted to lexical analysis with the help of the Alceste software. Among the analyzes performed by the software, we emphasized the results of the Descending Hierarchical Classification in our discussion. The work was organized in two studies and both were based on Serge Moscovicis Theory of Social Representations: in the first one, we address the sociogenesis of social representation of childbirth for the Movement focusing on the processes of objectification and anchoring; In the second, we analyze the communicational systems used in the writing of reports of childbirth. Together, both studies have shown that the Humanization of Birth Movement has issued a coherent and articulatediscourse based on the principles of its ideology generating cohesion among the adepts. In this sense, the social representation of childbirth emerges in our analyses as it provides to this event traces of naturalness, composing a broader experience of the feminine and of motherhood. The discourse is based on techno-scientific and experts arguments to emphasize the rewarding results of the experience as well as to distance it from the threatening signifiers such as pain. In a substantial part of the discourse these meanings are articulated in broadcasts, but the communication strategy mostly used by the adepts is advertising since in addition to reaffirming the lived experience, it is sought to summon the readers to the same kind of behavior. The understanding of the social knowledge built on this experience can support Psychologys role in the health field promoting womens assistance policies that can attend to the demands of this group which has increasingly sought greater protagonism in the experience of childbirth.