“What I Want Is Simple”
What do women want? It’s simple.
By Brigid McConville, White Ribbon Alliance
‘What I want is simple’, say the women in the new film of that name. Simple rights like ‘a clean and safe place to give birth’. Simple respect for every mother, and for every midwife who assists her. Yet the story behind the film is less simple.
Originally, it was White Ribbon Alliance in Tanzania who in 2012 came up with the idea of filming women talking about what they really want — before, during and after birth. Those same women turn out to be midwives as well as mothers, making the point that if we take care of midwives we take care of mothers, and often vice versa.
The film was a great success and so White Ribbon Alliance has now made this global version which includes women from many parts of the world. Again, the women in the film are saying they want clean and safe health facilities, but now there is an added emphasis on quality care, dignity, and about being treated equally whoever they are, wherever they are from. These women, who are also midwives, want to know their rights and for their rights to be respected.
The film has changed since 2012 because the world has changed. At the global level, significant research has been published — ranging from the State of the World’s Midwifery, to The Lancet Series on Midwifery, and ‘Midwives’ Voices, Midwives’ Realities’. These represent a major shift, recognising decades of neglect of women and calling for investment in midwifery as one of the best ways to save the lives of millions of mothers and newborns.
This chronic neglect of midwives is systematic and global. Low pay, long hours, shocking and often unsafe working conditions, lack of respect for their professional skills and a sense of being under-appreciated and even bullied by bosses and medical colleagues; the midwives’ lot is not enviable. Yet despite the challenges, so many midwives say how much they love their work — and the world does desperately need more of them.
A 2016 study by the Royal College of Midwives also revealed that UK midwives face many of the same debilitating and undermining pressures. Their voices echoed those of the midwives from 93 countries around the world who were surveyed for the global ‘Midwives’ Voices’ report.
So when it came to the re-make of ‘What I Want is Simple’, WRA included midwives working in the UK. They — together with the midwives from African countries who you’ll see speaking to camera — were keen to take part in such a positive project. But midwives often need permission from their employers to speak to the media; they cannot freely criticise their working conditions. And the midwives from African countries were particularly fearful of reprisals if their names were included in the credits, despite the fact that they are not making direct criticisms. At the end of the film we could only add a generic ‘thanks to all the midwives’ in order to protect their identities.
So here we are, celebrating International Day of Maternal Health and Rights for the third year in a row. The launch of this short film brings home the fact that what women and midwives want and need when giving birth and bringing life into the world isn’t complicated. They want just the very basic things that every woman and caregiver should be able to expect during this vital time: to be treated with dignity and respect, to have plentiful, clean supplies and to know their rights are recognized and respected. It also highlights that while global attention is at last on midwives as a solution to the scandal of preventable maternal and newborn deaths, we have only just begun to address the multi-layered issues of gender discrimination and power imbalances which still beset this profession of (mostly) women caring for women.
What we want is simple; how we get there is complex. But in 2017 we have an unprecedented opportunity to build on the recent research and move decisively forward by making the voices of midwives heard, and by uniting in solidarity for the rights of all women. As they say in our new film: ‘we are women, we are midwives, we are women and midwives, together’.
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