(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #236 - Public hospital: What want the midwives (fr, pt)

Strikes of midwives last October have been worn by a corporatist union has nothing to do 
with public health. His goal: push the midwives more liberalization. However, they are 
likely to have followed suit. ---- Strikes among midwives erupted at the end of last year. 
Midwives have ras-bowl their working conditions. These are infernal, especially in 
hospitals. Increasingly under pressure, they face a dehumanization of their profession, in 
connection with the development of new technologies, and of course with the liberalization 
of the hospital. And to top it off, their wages are not higher than those of nurses. It is 
therefore both a lack of moral and economic considerations they suffer. ---- 3D 
ultrasounds ---- Yet the demands of the strike lasts (strikes are easier when you know you 
will be requisitioned) do not always go in the direction of improving public health.

If all midwives are willing to have more recognition and better working conditions, the 
means to get there may differ. Some claims reflect an individualistic decline that 
accompanies the liberalization of health. Midwives liberal, and those who dream of being, 
hope to find personal salvation. But this illusion of a world where midwives are all 
liberal, as doctors, hospitals, is that of a two-tier medicine. On the one hand, wealthy 
people who are willing to pay higher fees for services as useless as sharp technologically 
(eg ultrasound in 3D), and the other women who no longer have that maternity factory in 
which midwives would not have the time to create the necessary relationship to the success 
of pregnancy.

Because that is what it is at the bottom. During pregnancy, it is a child born. But it is 
also a mother who is born, and a relationship between the two, which has an influence on 
the rest of the life. Consider midwives in supporting the entire pregnancy, it is to be a 
feminist. Is to recognize the role of women in society and their right to be accompanied 
in this new life.

A status that divides

Claim that the most divisive, driven by the ONSSF (National Organization Unions Midwives), 
the corporatist union is that of obtaining for midwives status hospital practitioner (like 
doctors). What appears to be a recognition, however, is not an improvement in their wages 
or improved working conditions in hospital. This is not the independence given to midwives 
in their field of physiology. But it is the disappearance of civil servant status (and all 
the benefits that go with it) and walking in front of a two-tier medicine. Using their 
suffering at work, ONSSF succeeded in mobilizing a large number of midwives on these 
themes, bringing even violently bashing the unions trying to give their opinion. This is 
not anecdotal. This is evidence of contempt for the rest of the hospital staff and is also 
a slippery slope on which they are developed.

Midwives will not benefit from further liberalization. They need more time and recognition 
for their work. It is in the opposite direction we need to go: technology must serve the 
relationship and not the reverse.

Clemence (AL Paris Northeast)