An analysis of denouncements to a public maternity humanized: dilemmas of the humanization

Abstract

In this article I will analyze, from denouncement made to the Municipal Maternity Hospital Maria Amelia, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, possible dilemmas, paradoxes and challenges of implementing humanized model in public institutions. From a denouncement, I will describe how it started a mothers (and fathers) movement, the tension this movement created within the Rio humanization movement’s and how these activists reacted to these cases. Focusing my analysis on the notion of women’s protagonism - vital to the humanization movement - my goal here is point the need of a change in the empowerment process, which leads to protagonism, when the birth’s humanization project surpasses a personal project to become a public policy. The movement’s emphasis is that women must engage on the search for information: such an emphasis can be very effective for individual projects and within the private health system, but it cannot be merely transposed into the public health system . In this case the women’s protagonism and empowerment through information cannot be expected as previously given or responsibility of other contexts, but a necessary element of a humanization policy.