Anna Rossetti in Conversation with UBA Midwifery Students – IPOV Project 2025

Buenos Aires, 18 May 2025 – To celebrate World Respectful Birth Week 2025 (13–19 May), held this year under the slogan “Before, during and after—do it your way,” the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) organised a free, in-person event on Thursday 15 May. The gathering brought together students, health-care professionals, jurists and academics to present the International Platform on Obstetric Violence (IPOV), hear the keynote address of Italian midwife Ana María Rossetti and discuss the challenges of implementing salutogenic, rights-based models of childbirth care.

An international platform: from northern Italy to Buenos Aires

Speaking live from Italy, Rossetti—graduate of the University of Milan and holder of a master’s degree in Posturology and Manual Therapies—outlined the IPOV project (#ipovrespectfulcare). Financed by the European Union and supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), IPOV adopts a salutogenic perspective, concentrating on the conditions that create health rather than on those that cause disease, as a pathway to preventing obstetric violence. In the auditorium, Argentine lawyer Silvina García Conto complemented the presentation with the local legal context.

A multidisciplinary panel

Alongside Rossetti and García Conto, the panel featured:

• M. Aurelia González, MSc, Chartered Psychologist
• Diana García, MSc, Social Worker
• Susana Rodríguez Corti, Licensed Midwife
• Verónica Favilla, Specialist Midwife
• Mariana Rosa, Licensed Midwife

The speakers exchanged experiences on respectful-birth protocols, informed consent and the hurdles that remain in enforcing Argentina’s Law 25.929 on the rights of parents and children during childbirth.

Salutogenesis: shifting the paradigm

At the heart of the symposium lay Aaron Antonovsky’s concept of salutogenesis, which sees health on a continuum rather than as a simple healthy/ill dichotomy. “Applying this lens to pregnancy and labour means moving from a ‘risk-obstetrics’ mindset to a ‘health-potential’ mindset, empowering families and curbing needless interventions,” García Conto explained.

A global context demanding action

UBA’s initiative dovetails with the international campaign led by France’s Association pour l’Accouchement Respecté (AFAR) and with the World Health Organization’s new “Healthy Beginnings, Hopeful Futures” drive to cut preventable maternal and neonatal mortality.

Salutophysiology and Feminist Midwifery: Anna Rossetti in Conversation with UBA Midwifery Students – IPOV Project 2025

The text below is a revised and complete English translation of the video’s transcript.
It expands the previous version to incorporate every detail contained in the original Spanish recording.

Full English Translation

Hello, good afternoon. My name is Ana María Rossetti and I want to thank you for allowing me to be present—albeit by video. I am truly sorry I could not join you live. I greatly admire the wonderful work being done at the University of Buenos Aires, and I send warm greetings to the lecturers, the students, and to my colleague and “sister”, Silvina Conto.

As I have said, I am a midwife in Italy and director of the Elementary School of Obstetric Art, founded by Verena Schmid. I also take part in the European project IPOV (International Platform on Obstetric Violence), which seeks to create an international platform on the highly sensitive issue of obstetric violence.

Because today is a day of sharing and reflection, I thought it would be meaningful to tell you about my own journey as a midwifery student in Milan—and how, more than a desire, a need arose in me to confront obstetric violence head-on.

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1. Student years and early frustrations

I began studying twenty-five years ago at the University of Milan. During my training I suffered deeply when I witnessed the way many women and babies were treated. I studied hard, earned the highest marks, and wanted to learn everything I could to help women, babies and families in the journey of birth. Yet the only part of that journey in which I was truly involved was the birth itself; pregnancy care was almost absent, and post-partum care was covered for barely the first five days.

The university taught us through textbooks written largely by male physicians, and I soon realised that this was only one slice of the knowledge available to a midwife. No one taught me how to learn from women and babies themselves. We—the so-called experts—believed we had every answer, while mothers and infants were assumed to possess no instinctive or human competence in the experience of pregnancy, birth or the post-partum. Our blindness to each mother’s and each child’s singular path crippled our clinical practice.

That is why obstetric textbooks keep repeating the same material—because books truly written by women about what it means to conceive, give birth and feed are rarely included in university syllabi, even when they exist.

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2. Pregnancy, birth and post-partum as a single cycle

Textbooks arbitrarily divide labour into three stages, yet by listening to women I learned there are more, and that pregnancy, birth and motherhood form a cyclic continuum. Psycho-neuro-endocrine phenomena of:

• the first trimester re-appear in the prodromal phase of labour and again—differently—in the very early post-partum;
• the second trimester echo in active labour and in the second phase of the puerperium;
• the third trimester emerge once more when the baby is six-to-nine months old.

Women who live these moments consciously not only learn a great deal about their babies—inside and outside the womb—but also about themselves. One key objective of midwifery care, therefore, is to help mothers and parents learn more about themselves throughout every reproductive process.

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3. The hospital “force paradigm”

Working in labour wards I noticed that, when labour became difficult—e.g. contractions with no cervical dilatation, or lack of fetal descent—hospital protocols tended to choose what Gherardi calls the paradigm of force: artificial rupture of membranes, synthetic oxytocin, and so on, all without first listening to the woman.

Through careful questioning I learned to read the body:

• Pain in the lower uterine segment is often linked to the environment—specifically, excessive sympathetic nervous activation.
• Pain in the body or fundus of the uterus after a contraction is more likely a metabolic problem.

I discovered this simply by asking women not just if they were in pain but where and how.

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4. Encounter with Verena Schmid and Salutophysiology

Meeting Verena Schmid was pivotal. She applied Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenesis to midwifery and named her model Salutophysiology. It replaces the current, risk-centred paradigm—which ultimately fuels obstetric violence—with care oriented towards health.

If physiopathology studies functional and biochemical changes linked to disease (páthos), salutophysiology studies the functional and biochemical changes that result from a healthy pregnancy, birth and post-partum. “Healthy” means full of resources, not “perfect”—or, as I like to joke, no one is a “Mary Poppins pregnancy”.

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5. Ten key principles (expanded)

1. Health-oriented care yields better outcomes than risk-centred care. WHO data show that simply piling on interventions does not cut maternal-infant morbidity or mortality.
2. Fear breeds violence. When everything is labelled a risk, families and professionals become afraid, and fear is one of the drivers of unconscious obstetric violence.
3. Parents and babies possess distinctive competences. Recognising these makes fear subside.
4. Pregnancy, birth and the puerperium are intrinsically healthy processes that can create lifelong physical, relational and social well-being.
5. Supporting health counterbalances disease and risk, even when the latter are present: no woman is a flawless Mary Poppins, but every woman harbours physiology.
6. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the red thread linking uterus, breasts, hormones, environment and emotion. Parasympathetic fibres mediate “rest-and-digest” and fetal growth; sympathetic fibres mediate “fight-or-flight”. Violence often appears when attendants ignore these ANS connections.
7. Most symptoms and risks shrink when health resources are identified and strengthened. Examples: advising mothers not to smoke or to wash hands is basic prevention; recognising dreams, emotions and changes in bodily rhythm as signs of prenatal bonding taps deep psycho-neuro-endocrine resources.
8. Health resources can always be reinforced. Knowing the channels of salutophysiology shows us how to bolster them and reduce stress.
9. Listening is fundamental. Narrative medicine values women’s intuitions—for example in the “Big-Baby” (macrosomia) issue. Ultrasounds often misjudge fetal weight, and induction has not lowered shoulder dystocia rates. Maternal intuition frequently outperforms clinical data. In Rimini (Italy) one hospital slashed induction rates by simply asking mothers, “How do you feel your baby?”, without any rise in neonatal pathology.
10. Salutophysiology is revolutionary because it teaches new clinical skills: combining careful communication, hands-on techniques, laboratory tests and—crucially—families’ lived experience, then stitching these “dots” together to form a fuller clinical picture.

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6. Empathy and political midwifery

An empathetic relationship and firm alliance with families is the bedrock of maternity care. Unlike a medically directive model—often driven by fear, gender stereotypes and technological excess—salutophysiology aims to amplify physiology, use technology only when necessary, and tailor care so that mothers, babies and entire generations grow healthier.

Midwifery is therefore political: there is no true midwifery without defending gender equality and reproductive rights. We practise one of the world’s oldest professions; despite patriarchy, medicalisation and technological abuse, we are still here. Not every woman needs a doctor throughout maternity, but every woman deserves a midwife at her side.

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7. Final message

With this message of hope and strength I close my talk. Thank you for listening—and for bearing with my “Spitalian” accent! I trust you have understood what I hold most precious in a woman’s work: recognising her own worth and the worth of midwives.

Many thanks, and let us keep on fighting—together.
Good-bye, Buenos Aires!

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About World Respectful Birth Week

Since 2004, this global observance has championed autonomy, cultural diversity and the physiological rhythms of each birth, urging health systems to embrace evidence-based, violence-free practices. The 2025 motto—“The power to give birth is yours”—reaffirms that decision-making and leadership rest with expectant families.

For further information, visit the World Respectful Birth Week website or follow IPOV on social media.