The concepts of medical misogyny, obstetric violence and disrespect and abuse (DA) in Childbirth overlap, but they are not the same concept. This article takes the concepts in turn.
Medical misogyny is the widest concept. It refers to gendered bias in medicine: women’s pain, symptoms, reproductive experiences, and embodied knowledge are dismissed, normalised, under-researched, or treated as less credible than biomedical or professional authority.
It is not limited to childbirth. It can appear in endometriosis, menstruation, menopause, chronic pain, autoimmune disease, heart disease, contraception, gynaecological procedures, and maternity care. The UK Women and Equalities Committee, for example, described women’s reproductive symptoms being normalised and pain dismissed, linking this to “medical misogyny” and racism in healthcare.
So medical misogyny is a structural diagnosis of medicine itself: it asks why women are so often not believed, not prioritised, or not treated as authoritative knowers of their own bodies.
2. Disrespect and abuse in childbirth
Disrespect and abuse in childbirth is narrower. It focuses on how women and birthing people are treated during facility-based childbirth.
This language is often used in global health and human rights literature. It includes things like verbal abuse, humiliation, physical abuse, non-consented procedures, lack of privacy, denial of pain relief, neglect, abandonment, discrimination, and detention in facilities. WHO frames disrespectful and abusive treatment during childbirth as a violation of the right to respectful care and as a threat to rights such as life, health, bodily integrity, and freedom from discrimination.
Bohren et al.’s influential typology uses the broader term mistreatment and classifies mistreatment during childbirth into domains including physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, stigma and discrimination, failure to meet professional standards, poor rapport between women and providers, and health-system constraints.
So this concept is often operational and measurable. It helps researchers, policymakers, and health systems identify what went wrong and design respectful maternity care interventions.
3. Obstetric violence
Obstetric violence is more politically and legally charged. It does not merely say “care was disrespectful” or “quality was poor.” It names the harm as a form of violence, often linked to gender inequality, reproductive control, medicalisation, and loss of autonomy.
The term is especially associated with Latin American feminist and legal movements. The Organization of American States’ materials define obstetric violence around the appropriation of women’s bodies and reproductive processes by health personnel, expressed through dehumanising treatment and abusive medicalisation/pathologisation, leading to loss of autonomy and decision-making capacity.
That means obstetric violence is not just about bad manners or individual cruelty. It is about how birth can become an institutional process in which the woman’s body is controlled, accelerated, cut, restrained, ignored, or over-medicalised without meaningful consent.
There is debate about how broad the concept should be. Some scholars argue that “obstetric violence” is powerful because it names harms that had been normalised; others warn that if it becomes too broad, it can become difficult to operationalise in law or policy.
Harm in Childbirth
Dr Katrine Nohr does not simply offer another label for the harm. She is asking why the human rights-based approach can fail in practice.
Her point is that childbirth is a very difficult place to act as an empowered rights-holder. During labour, the woman is physically vulnerable, dependent on clinicians, concerned for the baby, and embedded in a biomedical setting where doctors, midwives, risk protocols, fetal monitoring, medical records, and professional judgement carry more authority than her own embodied knowledge.
Dr Katrine Nohr’s thesis found that many mothers used a pragmatic rather than explicitly rights-based approach during childbirth, partly because of the mother–infant relationship and the immediate need to secure care. After childbirth, even when women did try to use complaints, legal claims, or accountability mechanisms, many felt re-traumatised rather than empowered because the same biomedical knowledge/power hierarchy was reproduced.
Dr Katrine Nohr shows that women’s complaints could be dismissed as “subjective” or “emotional,” while professional or biomedical knowledge was treated as more authoritative. She describes the “authoritative knowledge” hierarchy as operating not only during childbirth but also afterwards in accountability mechanisms, with healthcare providers’ knowledge positioned above mothers’ accounts.
In court or formal hearings, the problem can become even sharper: the mother may have to prove injury, fault, causation, and credibility while being cross-examined, often after trauma, bereavement, or infant injury. Nohr reports that mothers who went through complaints procedures or court could feel re-traumatised and give up rather than gain empowerment or justice.
How they fit together
A non-consented vaginal examination, forced intervention, or ignored request for help could be described in all four ways, but each term highlights something different.
It is medical misogyny if the woman’s pain or testimony is dismissed because women are treated as unreliable or overreacting. It is disrespect and abuse if the conduct violates standards of dignified, respectful maternity care. It is obstetric violence if the focus is on gendered domination, coercion, medicalisation, and loss of reproductive autonomy. And it illustrates Nohr’s argument if the woman cannot effectively assert her rights during birth, and later finds that complaints or courts privilege biomedical authority over her lived account.
Dr Katrine Nohr shows that childbirth and court/accountability processes can both reproduce a hierarchy in which biomedical knowledge is treated as objective and authoritative, while women’s embodied knowledge is treated as subjective, emotional, or legally weak. The result is that a human rights approach premised on empowerment and rights-claiming may underestimate how deeply power shapes both the original clinical encounter and the later search for justice.