One-Day Jigsaw Workshop on (Dis)Respectful Maternity Care
May 11, 2026IPOV Roundtable for Human Rights in Childbirth
May 25, 2026The Aesthetics of
Birth and Obstetric Violence:
An Interdisciplinary Reading
from Art, Philosophy and Medicine
“If everything is art, then birth is one of its most radical forms. And like every form of art, it requires time, space and respect. Recognising this is not a theoretical luxury, but an ethical and political urgency.”
Author:
Dr. Guillermo Javier De Cicco
Obstetrician/Gynecologist
Hospital Materno Infantil de San Isidro, Argentina
Member of the IPOV San Isidro Group, Argentina
Introduction
Childbirth has historically been approached by modern medicine as a biological event subject to control, measurement and intervention. This paradigm, consolidated throughout the twentieth century, has contributed significantly to reducing maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. At the same time, it has generated a process of increasing medicalisation that has displaced other fundamental dimensions of the experience of giving birth. Among these, bodily experience, sensory perception and the subjective dimension of birth have been progressively rendered invisible.
In this context, the concept of obstetric violence emerges as a critical category that makes it possible to identify institutional practices that violate the autonomy, dignity and integrity of pregnant and birthing people. However, much of the analysis of obstetric violence has been developed from legal, epidemiological or bioethical frameworks, leaving a key dimension relatively unexplored: the aesthetic dimension of childbirth.
This article proposes an epistemological shift: to consider childbirth not only as a clinical event, but as an aesthetic experience in the deepest sense of the term. That is, as an embodied process involving perception, sensitivity, temporality, spatiality and the production of meaning. From this perspective, the birthing body is not an object of intervention, but a subject undergoing an intensive experience comparable, on multiple levels, to processes of artistic creation.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that brings together medicine, philosophy, anthropology and contemporary art, this work explores the resonances between artistic practices centred on the body — particularly those addressing pain, matter, darkness and limits — and the experience of physiological birth. In this sense, the work of artists such as Pierre Soulages, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramović, Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois offers fertile ground for thinking about the undomesticated body, the emergence of the invisible and the power of the sensory.
It is also proposed that obstetric violence can be understood, in aesthetic terms, as an interruption of the perceptive and bodily process of childbirth. The imposition of external rhythms, the fragmentation of the body into organs and functions, and technical hyper-visibility constitute forms of control and ruptures in the aesthetic experience of birth.
Finally, the article argues for the need to move towards an obstetrics that recognises and preserves the aesthetic dimension of childbirth, understood as a condition of possibility for a respectful, meaningful and non-violent experience.
However, any contemporary analysis of obstetric violence must be situated within a conceptual framework that allows us to understand the body not as a mere biological support, but as a territory crossed by power relations, institutional knowledge and cultural practices. In this sense, the work of Michel Foucault is particularly relevant for understanding how modern medicine has operated as a device of control over bodies, especially those linked to reproduction.
The pregnant body can be understood as a space of biopolitical intervention, where practices of surveillance, normalisation and discipline intersect. Within this framework, childbirth ceases to be an autonomous physiological process and becomes an event managed through protocols, technologies and professional hierarchies. This shift is not neutral: it implies a transformation in the way the body is perceived, fragmented and governed.
In dialogue with these perspectives, anthropological studies have pointed out that childbirth is also a cultural event. Obstetric practices are neither universal nor neutral; they are shaped by values, beliefs and social structures. The medicalisation of birth, characteristic of Western healthcare systems, has tended to make traditional knowledge and forms of support centred on the body and experience invisible.
At the intersection of biopolitics, phenomenology and anthropology, obstetric violence can be understood as a specific form of institutional violence exercised upon the pregnant body through the dispossession of its experience. It is not only a matter of unnecessary interventions or inadequate practices, but of a deeper rupture: the interruption of the bond between the subject and their own body.
The Birthing Body as an “Aesthetic Experience”
The notion of aesthetics, in its original sense — aisthesis — refers to sensory perception. Before being associated with art, aesthetics referred to the capacity to feel, to experience the world through the body. From this perspective, childbirth can be understood as an aesthetic experience insofar as it is an intensive process of perception and transformation.
Labour involves a series of progressive changes in the perception of the body, time and space. Contractions, far from being merely physiological events, create a rhythm that reorganises temporal experience. The time of childbirth is neither linear nor homogeneous: it is an expanded time, sometimes suspended, in which repetition and intensity generate a particular form of bodily awareness.
Likewise, pain in childbirth, often pathologised in medical discourse, can be reconsidered from an aesthetic perspective. This does not mean romanticising suffering, but recognising that pain forms part of a meaningful experience that can acquire meaning within a supported and respectful process. In this sense, the pain of childbirth differs from other types of pain: it is not a symptom of damage, but part of a physiological process leading to the emergence of new life.
This aesthetic dimension of childbirth resonates with processes of artistic creation. In both cases, these are experiences involving transformation, intensity and the production of something new. The birthing body, like the creative body, passes through threshold states in which ordinary categories of perception are altered.
Recognising childbirth as an aesthetic experience therefore means shifting the gaze from control to lived experience. It means enabling a space in which the body can unfold its own rhythm, without being constantly interrupted by external interventions. In this sense, respectful obstetrics can be understood as a practice that preserves the necessary conditions for this experience to take place.
Art as a Language of the Undomesticated Body
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various artistic practices have explored the body as a territory of experience, resistance and transformation. These practices offer a privileged conceptual field for thinking about childbirth beyond its biomedical dimension.
The work of Pierre Soulages, particularly his exploration of outrenoir, proposes a relationship between darkness and light that is deeply suggestive when thinking about birth. In his paintings, black is not absence, but the condition that makes the emergence of light possible. This conceptual inversion allows us to reconsider the darkness of the body as a fertile space in which something can appear.
Ana Mendieta, for her part, developed a body of work centred on the relationship between body and nature. Her Siluetas, in which the body is inscribed into the earth, evoke a continuity between the human and the natural that resonates with childbirth as both a biological and symbolic process.
In the field of performance, Marina Abramović has explored the limits of the body, pain and endurance. Her works reveal the body’s capacity to pass through extreme experiences, as well as the relational dimension of these experiences, in which the other — the audience, the companion — plays a fundamental role.
Likewise, the work of Frida Kahlo offers an intimate and visceral representation of the female body, marked by pain, illness and motherhood. Her paintings destabilise idealised representations of the body, showing both its vulnerability and its power.
Finally, Louise Bourgeois worked extensively on motherhood, memory and the psyche. Her sculptures, often unsettling, explore the ambivalence of the maternal experience, moving away from simplified or romanticised visions.
Taken together, these artistic practices allow us to think of the body not as an object to be controlled, but as a subject of experience. Art, in this sense, becomes a language capable of expressing what medical discourse cannot fully capture: the sensory, symbolic and affective dimension of the birthing body.
Birth occurs, in its most primary dimension, at a threshold. It is not merely a biological passage — from inside to outside — but a radical transformation in the experience of the body, time and world. This liminal character of childbirth has been widely noted by anthropology, which places it within so-called rites of passage, in which the subject passes through an intermediate, ambiguous state where ordinary categories are suspended.
In this sense, the notion of threshold allows us to think of childbirth as a space of indeterminacy. During labour, the pregnant body ceases to respond to the ordinary logic of conscious control and enters a different regime, closer to what some phenomenological approaches have called pre-reflective consciousness. Perception intensifies, language becomes insufficient, and the body assumes a radical protagonism.
It is at this point that the work of Pierre Soulages acquires particular resonance. His concept of outrenoir — beyond black — proposes an inversion of the traditional relationship between light and darkness. Rather than conceiving black as absence, he presents it as an active field, capable of generating light from its own materiality. This idea allows us to rethink the darkness of childbirth not as a space of danger or ignorance, but as a necessary condition for the emergence of something new.
The medicalisation of birth, however, has tended to reject this darkness. Constant lighting, bodily exposure, technological surveillance and the need to make every aspect of the process visible respond to a logic of control that seeks to eliminate uncertainty. But this elimination of shadow has a cost: the loss of the threshold as a space of transformation.
Childbirth often requires conditions of semi-darkness, intimacy and protection. This is not merely an environmental issue, but a dimension deeply connected to physiology and subjective experience. The inhibition of external stimuli, the reduction of exposure and the possibility of inhabiting a protected space favour the release of key hormones in labour, such as oxytocin.
From this perspective, darkness is not an obstacle, but a medium. A medium that allows the body to unfold according to its own logic, without being interrupted by an external gaze that fragments it and turns it into an object.
Obstetric Violence as Aesthetic Rupture
If childbirth can be understood as an aesthetic experience — as a sensory, perceptive and meaningful process — then obstetric violence can be interpreted as an interruption of that experience. It is not only a matter of practices that are inadequate from a clinical or ethical point of view, but of a profound alteration in the way the body inhabits and passes through birth.
Systematic intervention upon the pregnant body — whether through unnecessary procedures, the imposition of timeframes or the restriction of movement — produces a fragmentation of experience. The body ceases to be a subject that perceives and acts, and becomes an object upon which procedures are performed. This transformation is technical and symbolic: it entails a dispossession of the body, a loss of agency.
From an aesthetic perspective, this rupture can be understood as the imposition of an external rhythm upon a process that has its own temporality. Labour does not follow a linear or uniform logic; its development is variable, unpredictable and singular. The standardisation of timeframes and the application of rigid protocols introduce a discontinuity that interferes with the process’s own dynamics.
Likewise, the hyper-visibility of the body — through constant monitoring, repeated examinations and permanent exposure — can be interpreted as a form of violence. Not all visibility is neutral: the medical gaze, when exercised without mediation, can become an instrument of control that disarticulates bodily experience.
In this sense, obstetric violence is not limited to explicit acts of mistreatment. It can also appear in more subtle forms, linked to the organisation of space, time and practices themselves. The imposition of an external logic upon the birthing body constitutes a form of violence insofar as it interrupts the body’s capacity to unfold its own process.
Understanding obstetric violence from this perspective allows us to broaden the field of analysis and recognise that quality of care depends not only on the absence of physical harm, but also on the preservation of experience.
Architecture, Space and Experience: Design as Obstetric Practice
The space in which childbirth takes place is not a neutral element. Far from being a mere container, the architecture of birth rooms acts as a device that modulates bodily experience, conditions practices and configures power relations.
Traditional hospital models have privileged spaces designed according to a functional and technical logic, oriented towards surveillance and intervention. The arrangement of furniture, intense lighting, the centrality of the obstetric bed and the constant presence of technology reinforce a conception of childbirth as a medical event requiring control.
However, in recent decades, proposals have emerged that seek to transform these spaces from an experience-centred perspective. Salutogenic design, inspired by the concept of salutogenesis, proposes the creation of environments that favour health and well-being, rather than focusing exclusively on disease prevention.
Within this framework, the experience developed at the Hospital Materno Infantil de San Isidro constitutes a significant example. The creation of a birth room conceived as la casita — “the little house” — implied a shift in the way space was understood: from a clinical environment to a habitable, intimate and welcoming environment. This change was not merely aesthetic, but deeply conceptual.
The arrangement of light, the possibility of movement, the presence of non-medicalised elements and the reduction of invasive stimuli help generate an environment in which the body can unfold its own rhythm. Architecture, in this sense, becomes a therapeutic tool, capable of accompanying the process rather than interfering with it.
From an aesthetic perspective, the birth space can be understood as an extension of the body. The relationship between interior and exterior, between body and environment, becomes particularly relevant at a moment when perception is intensified. A hostile, cold or excessively exposed space may hinder the process, while a cared-for and respectful environment may facilitate it.
The design of space also has implications for the way power is exercised. The hierarchical distribution of elements, the position of healthcare staff and access to technological devices configure relationships that can favour or limit the autonomy of the pregnant or birthing person.
Rethinking the architecture of childbirth therefore means rethinking obstetric practice as a whole. It is not only a matter of changing the physical environment, but of transforming the logic that sustains it.
Towards an Aesthetic and Ethical Obstetrics
Incorporating the aesthetic dimension into obstetric practice does not mean displacing clinical criteria, but broadening the field of care. It means recognising that the quality of care cannot be evaluated solely in terms of biomedical outcomes, but also in relation to the lived experience of those giving birth.
An aesthetic and ethical obstetrics implies, first of all, recognising the pregnant and birthing body as a subject of experience. This means respecting its times, rhythms and ways of inhabiting the process. Within this framework, intervention ceases to be the central axis of practice and becomes a resource available when necessary.
This perspective also requires a transformation in the training of healthcare professionals. The incorporation of tools from philosophy, art and the social sciences can help develop a sensitivity that allows professionals to understand the complexity of the childbirth experience. The aim is not to replace technical knowledge, but to complement it with a broader perspective.
In this sense, art can play a fundamental role as a pedagogical tool. Artistic practices that explore the body, pain and perception offer a language that allows access to dimensions that medical discourse tends to leave aside. Integrating these practices into training may help generate professionals who are more attentive to the experience of the other.
Finally, an aesthetic and ethical obstetrics also implies a political dimension. The way childbirth is attended is not independent of the social and cultural structures in which it is embedded. Promoting respectful practices implies questioning hegemonic models, redistributing power and recognising rights.
Conclusion
Childbirth, far from being an exclusively biological event, is a complex experience in which physiological, perceptive, symbolic and social dimensions are intertwined. The medicalisation of birth has enabled significant advances in terms of safety, but it has also contributed to making fundamental aspects of this experience invisible.
The proposal to think of childbirth as an aesthetic experience allows us to recover the centrality of the body and perception, opening up a field of reflection that goes beyond the limits of medicine. From this perspective, obstetric violence can be understood not only as a form of physical or psychological harm, but as an interruption in the experience of the body.
Dialogue with contemporary art offers conceptual and sensory tools for thinking about these issues. The works of artists who have explored the body, darkness, pain and limits make visible dimensions that medical discourse cannot fully capture. Likewise, the transformation of birth spaces and the incorporation of an aesthetic perspective into obstetric practice constitute fundamental steps towards more respectful and meaningful care.
Ultimately, recognising childbirth as an aesthetic experience implies a paradigm shift: moving from a logic centred on control to a logic centred on accompaniment. This shift has clinical, ethical and political implications, as it redefines the relationship between body, knowledge and power.
Thinking of childbirth as an aesthetic experience is not merely a conceptual exercise, but a political position. In a context where pregnant and birthing bodies have historically been appropriated by technical discourses and hierarchical institutions, recovering the sensory dimension of birth means contesting meanings and redistributing power.
Contemporary art has shown that the body is not a passive object, but a territory of inscription, memory and transformation. In this sense, childbirth can be understood as one of the most radical creative acts: a process in which the body produces life, but also experience and meaning.
From this perspective, obstetric violence is not limited to the presence of inadequate practices. It manifests as an interruption of the body’s creative process. The imposition of external rhythms, the fragmentation of experience and the denial of subjectivity constitute forms of silencing.
Faced with this, an aesthetic obstetrics does not mean beautifying birth, but recognising its complexity. It means enabling conditions in which the body can unfold its power, accepting uncertainty and sustaining the necessary opacity for something to emerge.
“If everything is art, then birth is one of its most radical forms.
And like every form of art, it requires time, space and respect.
Recognising this is not a theoretical luxury,
but an ethical and political urgency.”
References
Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge. Siglo XXI; 1976.
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Planeta-Agostini; 1945.
World Health Organization. The Prevention and Elimination of Disrespect and Abuse during Facility-Based Childbirth. WHO; 2014.
Buckley, S. J. Hormonal physiology of childbearing. Journal of Perinatal Education. 2015;24(3):145–153.
Davis-Floyd, R. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. University of California Press; 1992.
WHO. Intrapartum Care for a Positive Childbirth Experience. 2018.
Sadler, M. et al. Moving beyond disrespect and abuse: addressing structural dimensions of obstetric violence. Reproductive Health Matters. 2016.
Bourgeault, I. L. et al. Too posh to push? Social Science & Medicine. 2004.
Odent, M. Birth and Breastfeeding: Rediscovering the Needs of Women during Pregnancy and Childbirth. 1979.
Additional Recent Recommended Bibliography
Bohren, M. A. et al. 2020–2023. Mistreatment during childbirth globally.
WHO. 2025. Respectful maternal and newborn care.
Sadler, M. et al. Updates on structural violence in obstetrics.
BMJ Open. 2024–2025. Perinatal care experiences and outcomes.
Reproductive Health. 2024–2025. Obstetric violence and mental health outcomes.
Inviting Contributions
If you are an artist and this space resonates with you, we invite you to share your work — video, image, sound or performance — as a way to bear witness and open new paths of understanding.
Your piece does not have to “explain” obstetric violence; it can simply emerge from the body, from memory, from care.
Each contribution will help broaden this collective archive of voices, gestures and emotions that seek recognition, dignity and repair.
We also invite you to explore our Art and Activism section, a space dedicated to artistic practices that make visible embodied experiences, challenge institutional violence and open sensitive, political and collective ways of understanding respectful maternity care.