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ObjectivesTo explore healthcare professionals’ perspectives and practices regarding informed consent during childbirth, particularly in the context of increased public awareness and discourse surrounding obstetric violence (OV) in France.DesignA qualitative study based on semistructured interviews and non-participant observations.SettingFour maternity units in France, representing a diversity of institutional contexts.ParticipantsA purposive sample of 32 participants, including midwives and obstetricians, was recruited across the four sites.MethodsData were collected through 32 semistructured interviews and in situ observations in labour and delivery rooms. A thematic analysis was conducted using a phenomenological approach, supported by NVivo software.ResultsFour main themes emerged: (1) relational malaise in the caregiver–patient relationship, reinforced by public discourse on OV, further hindered shared decision-making and open communication. (2) Challenges between caring values and systemic constraints (eg, lack of time, staffing shortages and protocol-driven care) limited professionals’ ability to engage in meaningful informed consent discussions. (3) Safety paradigm in obstetrics: fetal well-being emerged as a central and non-negotiable argument to justify medical interventions during childbirth. (4) Informed consent as a source of tension, where professionals struggled to balance legal and ethical obligations with clinical urgency, often leading to coercive or merely formal consent processes.ConclusionsInformed consent during childbirth remains a critical and unresolved ethical challenge. This study highlights systemic, relational and emotional barriers that hinder shared decision-making and compromise the core ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence and justice. Addressing these issues requires structural changes, improved working conditions to support individualised care, better training in ethics and communication and greater recognition of the moral distress experienced by healthcare professionals.Registration numberRegistration number 22-219 from CEEI-IRB INSERM (Research Institutional Review Board INSERM, France) (IRB 00003888, IORG 0003254, FWA 00005831).

Many first-time mothers (primiparous) within UK National Health Service (NHS) settings require an obstetric intervention to deliver their babies safely. While the antepartum period allows time for conversations about consent for planned interventions, such as elective caesarean section, current practice is that, in emergencies, consent is addressed in the moments before the intervention takes place. This paper explores whether there are limitations on the validity of consent offered in time-pressured and emotionally charged circumstances, specifically concerning emergency obstetric interventions. Using the legal framework of the Mental Capacity Act, Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board (2015) and McCulloch v Forth Valley Health Board (2023), we argue that while women have the capacity to consent during labour, their autonomy is best supported by providing more information about instrumental delivery (ID) during the antepartum period. This conclusion is supported by some national guidelines, including those developed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, but not all. Further, we examine the extent to which these principles are upheld in modern-day practice. Data suggest there is relatively little antepartum information provision regarding ID within NHS settings, and that primiparous women do not report a thorough understanding of ID before labour. Based on these results, and bearing in mind the pressures under which NHS obstetric services currently operate, we recommend further research into patient and clinician perceptions of the consent process for ID. Pending these results, we discuss possible modes of information delivery in future practice.

Heuser, Eller and Byrne provide important descriptive ethics data about how physicians counsel women on the clinical management of pregnancies complicated by severe fetal anomalies. The authors present an account of what such counselling ought to be based on, the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient and the professional responsibility model of obstetric ethics. When there is certainty about the diagnosis and either a very high probability of either death as the outcome of the anomaly or survival with severe and irreversible deficit of cognitive developmental capacity as a result of the anomaly diagnosed, the pregnant woman should be offered the alternatives of aggressive and non-aggressive obstetric management and induced abortion before viability. It is also ethically permissible to offer feticide followed by termination of pregnancy after viability in such cases. This ethically justified approach will reduce the variation in the actual practices of specialists in maternal–fetal medicine described by Heuser, Eller and Byrne.

Decisions about how and where they deliver their baby are extremely important to pregnant women. There are very strong ethical norms that women’s autonomy should be respected, and that plans around birth should be personalised. However, there appear to be profound challenges in practice to respecting women’s choices in pregnancy and labour. Choices carry risks and consequences—to the woman and her child; also potentially to her caregivers and to other women.What does it mean for women’s autonomy to be respected in obstetrics? How should health professionals respond to refusals of treatment or requests for care outside normal guidelines? What are the ethical limits to autonomy? In this clinical ethics round table, service users, midwives, obstetricians, philosophers and ethicists respond to two hypothetical cases drawn from real-life scenarios.

Retraction of scientific papers may occur when the peer-review or publication process is compromised, even in cases where authors have no responsibility for the identified shortcomings. Using a recent case in which a peer-reviewed open-access mega-journal retracted a series of articles due to compromised peer review, also one from our group, this work examines the implications of limited editorial transparency in the retraction process. While failures in peer review can undermine the integrity of the scientific literature, inadequate communication by journal editors may have substantial negative effect on affected authors, particularly early-career researchers, including disorientation, humiliation, and a sense of perceived injustice. This analysis highlights the factors contributing to these outcomes such as the sense of loss associated with the substantial time and effort devoted to the research, as well as the practical impossibility of submitting the retracted article to alternative journals. Transparency represents a frontline defence against research misconduct but the call for increased transparency cannot be one-sided. Transparency needs to be a useful tool for the entire system, for those who report data and for those who publish data.

Background Moral distress, or the inability to carry out what one believes to be ethically appropriate because of constraints or barriers, is understudied in obstetrics and gynecology. We sought to characterize moral distress among Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM) fellows using a standardized survey. Methods We disseminated a national anonymized survey study of MFM fellows electronically regarding moral distress using a validated questionnaire with supplemental questions pertaining to specific challenges within MFM clinical care. Multivariable linear regression modeling was used to examine the association between abortion restrictions, maternal mortality, and moral distress, controlling for demographic variables. Thematic analysis was performed for the free text responses elaborating upon moral distress and grouped by thematic elements. We hypothesized that training in states with more abortion restrictions and higher maternal mortality would be associated with higher moral distress scores. Results Among 245 total responses (61% response rate), 177 complete responses (44% complete response rate) were included for analysis. Most of our respondents identified as female (78.5%), White (71.8%), and training in urban programs (83.1%). 37.9% of respondents reported training in the Northeast, with the remainder of respondents evenly distributed across the United States. The mean score for the validated questions was 85.9  ±  48.8, with female gender identity associated with higher measures of moral distress on the validated portion of the questionnaire as compared to male gender identity (90.1  ±  49.2 vs. 70.4  ±  44.7, p  < 0.05), whereas more advanced training was associated with higher measures of moral distress on the supplemental questions as compared to those less advanced in training (20.9  ±  11.8 vs. 28.5  ±  15.9 vs. 25.9  ±  15.6 for PGY-5 vs. PGY-6 vs. PGY-7 and PGY-8 combined, respectively, p  < 0.05). After adjustment, higher measure of moral distress on the validated questionnaire was associated with training in states designated “Abortion restrictive” as compared to “Abortion most protective” (beta estimate 27.80 and p  < 0.01). Of 34 free responses, 65% referred to limitations on abortion access and reproductive justice as causes of significant moral distress. Conclusion MFM fellows who identify as female reported higher measures of moral distress, as well as those training in states with more abortion restrictions. Among free text respondents, abortion restrictions underlie a significant proportion of moral distress.

Anthropologist-clinicians who engage in both ethnographic inquiry and clinical practice confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological predicaments that can challenge and enhance the moral practice and ethics of care inherent both to healing and to ethnography. Clinician-ethnographers often find themselves practicing within harmful systems that they also critique, such as hospitals or carceral institutions. This paper analyzes the dual practice of obstetrical care and ethnography in a county jail and a county hospital. These intertwined roles involve wrestling with sometimes conflicting vocational and ethical obligations to heal, to protect privacy, to address bodily consequences of systemic oppressions, and to critique the systems that mete human suffering. Developing a consciousness of clinical-ethnographers’ complicity, rather than disavowing it, can be aligned with approaches of abolition medicine to reimagine more just forms of healing.

Those giving birth within modern maternity systems are recognised as facing a number of barriers to person-centred care. In this paper, I argue that in order to best facilitate the conditions for positive change, work needs to be done to provide a more granular articulation of the specific barriers. I then offer a nuanced and contextually aware articulation of one key component of the overall failure to ensure person-centred care: medical authority and the expectation of conformity. Articulating these barriers with increased specificity is valuable, as it creates a stronger foundation from which to challenge existing problems which serve to constrain the autonomy of birthing individuals. The analysis offered in this paper also underscores the need for change at an institutional, rather than individual, level.

Ethical medical care of pregnant women in Australia should include the real provision of information regarding the risks and benefits of vaginal birth. Routinely obtaining consent for the different ways in which childbirth is commonly intervened on and the assistance involved (such as midwife-led care or a planned caesarean section) and providing sufficient information for women to evaluate the harms and benefits of the care on offer, would not only enable the empowerment of women but would align with the current standard of care as established by Rogers v Whittaker.

j.suurmond@amsterdamumc.nl A race equality taskforce has been launched in the UK to explore racial disparities in women’s healthcare and racism in the obstetric and gynaecology workforce.1 The risk of covid-19 related death among some ethnic groups is significantly higher than in those of white ethnicity.2 Without collecting, registering, and using data about patients’ ethnicity we would not be informed about these important (and undesirable) ethnic differences. Both the scientific community and policy makers should ensure that such research serves rather than harms the interests of minorities, by combating inequalities in health and access to care, for example, rather than through discrimination on the basis of research results. 7 May 2020. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwales/2march2020to10april2020 3 Stronks K Kulu-Glasgow I Agyemang C. The utility of “country of birth” for the classification of ethnic groups in health research: the Dutch experience.