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Review: Birth memories of Jordanian women: findings from qualitative data

It is always interesting and thought provoking to read papers that illuminate the experiences of giving birth in other cultures. This paper explores the experiences of women in Jordan giving birth in a highly technologised hospital environment. The data are uncomfortable to read, with women describing pain and fear in addition to the technological processing. Not only are the descriptions of birth distressing to read, but as a midwife it is most disheartening to read that women experienced birth as torture and were shouted at and treated in an inhumane way. It would be easy to sit back and think that women in the UK have an altogether better deal and that their birth experiences are not reflected in this piece of research. For someone who is used to practising in the UK such treatment of women would not be tolerated according to the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council ‘Code’, which is clear that ‘You must treat people as individuals and respect their dignity’ (NMC, 2008: 2). Women in the UK and other developed countries do experience traumatic birth and often this is associated with technological intervention and emergencies. Indeed it has been defined by Beck (2004: 28) as ‘an event occurring during the labor and delivery process that involves actual or threatened serious injury or death to the mother or her infant. The birthing woman experiences intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and horror’. These emotions are all described in the paper published here. Birth is an experience in which women should be treated with respect and mothers should be able to cherish their memories. To enable them to do this midwives need to treat them as individuals, consider their wishes and involve them in the decisions that take place about the use of technology in birth. In educating midwives, consideration should to be given to models of care in which women can be involved in making decisions and where technology is used in a thoughtful way in response to a medical need and not in a bureaucratic manner (Crozier et al., 2007). This paper describes the experiences of women and in their voices you gain a sense of the way they were viewed by those practitioners present during the birth; however, what is missing in this report is the perspective of those practitioners. It would be interesting to investigate their perception of the birth environment and process.