Conclusions

Following the book’s philosophical analysis of obstetric violence’s causes, the conclusion proposes that to confront it, both birthing carers and birthing subjects must adopt a new paradigm of what birthing bodies and subjects are and what birth is . This novel conceptualization reclaims birth as grotesque, erratic, and uncertain, asking to be faced through disorientation and awe, not control, domestication, and violence. The chapter suggests that the grotesque birthing body causes shame, disgust, and anxiety—both to the medical staff and to birthing women themselves—frequently leading to violence from those attending births in medicalized settings, and to complicity with their own submission by laboring women. Disability theories—mainly crip phenomenology—are used to propose a new way of relating to the birthing body, a novel perspective that will help to embrace this body in its grotesqueness instead of insisting on violently domesticating it. The chapter uses the concept of disorientation, as conceived in disability theories such as those of Ami Harbin and Corinne Lajoie, who present it as a constructive trope for understanding the disabled and diseased body as one to be, not controlled or normalized, but reclaimed as disoriented and thus epistemically productive and humanly enriching.