Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
‘It's a scar on my soul that will never heal.’ ‘… the most difficult has been of not asserting my rights as a mother.’ ‘… my child's birth felt like violence.’ These are the voices of some women who experienced disrespectful, abusive, or unconsented care during childbirth in India. At first glance, these women appear privileged – middle-class, urban residents, with college degrees, fluent in English, and with access to ‘good’ quality private healthcare. Nevertheless, they felt disempowered and disrespected during childbirth. Most instances of disrespect and abuse in the Indian context have been reported by rural, poorer women with lower levels of education, and birthing in public facilities (Shrivastava and Sivakami, 2020). While the experiences of disrespect and abuse of white, middle-class, or upper-class women during childbirth (Shabot, 2019) have been extensively examined, there has been limited academic research on disrespectful care for women of a higher socio-economic status in India, except for a few that have explored experiences of birth in low-cost private facilities (Sharma et al., 2019). Why do privileged Indian women giving birth in posh, well-equipped, private institutions experience disrespectful and abusive care at birth? In theory, privileged women possess significant economic, social, and cultural capital that should protect them from mistreatment in Indian institutions (Sudhinaraset et al., 2016). By extension, they also possess considerable cultural health capital (CHC), that is, ‘… a specialized form of cultural capital that can be leveraged in healthcare contexts to effectively engage with medical providers’ (Shim, 2010: 3).