Within a few years of the report, Uruguay (2001), Argentina (2004), Brazil (2005) and Puerto Rico (2006) approved laws granting women the right to be accompanied during labor and delivery. Brazil and Argentina also developed broader legislation encouraging the “humanization” of childbirth.

In 2007, Venezuela became the first nation to create a law specifically addressing obstetric violence. Two years later, Argentina enacted a similar law; it was followed by Panama, multiple states in Mexico, Bolivia (with a law referring to “violence against reproductive rights” and “violence in health services”) and El Salvador (this one calling for dignified treatment in maternal and reproductive health services).

These laws came not a moment too soon. In Latin America, reports of obstetric violence have been extensively documented. They’ve even come to be expected, as if this is the price women have to pay for having any sexuality. The most common kinds of mistreatment are non-consensual procedures (including sterilization), non-evidence-based interventions like routine episiotomies, and physical, verbal and sexual abuse.

We can only wonder why obstetric abuse is so ubiquitous in Latin America, a place where motherhood is often sanctified. Maybe it’s precisely because of this. In our conservative, patriarchal societies, a woman’s true vocation is to be a mother. We must sacrifice ourselves to fulfill our biological destinies. This means submitting to the wills of husbands and doctors; selflessness and devotion are our most prized attributes. And if we remain long-suffering saints, we cannot gain sexual consciousness, or bodily autonomy.

Putting a name to the practice of obstetric violence is the first step toward standing up against it, and so, of course, doctors have begun fighting back. Last year, Brazil’s Federal Council of Medicine condemned the term obstetric violence as an aggression toward doctors bordering on “hysteria.” Note that the council did not condemn the violence itself, merely the word choices of the victims. I wonder if it used the word “hysteria” on purpose.

In a similar vein, in February, Rio de Janeiro’s Regional Medical Council issued a resolution forbidding obstetricians from signing personal birth plans, calling them a deleterious “fad.” The council also argued that childbirth is risky and demands quick decisions that doctors should be able to make without the fear of legal repercussions. “There is no time to explain what will be done or to revoke birth plans,” it stated. According to the council, obstetric violence is “another invented term to defame doctors.”

It is disappointing to see that some doctors are more concerned with the way this semantic “aggression” injures their prestige than with the concrete, horrendous reality of abuse that abounds against women in childbirth, not only in Latin America but elsewhere. It’s plain that they resent the limitations on their authority.