How is obstetric violence conceptualised and understood in the academic literature? A meta-narrative review

Obstetric violence has emerged as a powerful yet contested term that describes harmful and abusive practices and institutional and systemic failings in reproductive healthcare. While its origins lie in Latin American legal and activist movements, the term has since entered English-language academic literature across multiple disciplines. This article presents a meta-narrative review of how obstetric violence has been conceptualised in scholarly work published in English. Drawing from research traditions spanning law, ethics, philosophy, medicine, midwifery, health research and the social sciences, we trace the evolution of the term and examine definitional trends, disciplinary variations and conceptual tensions.

Our analysis reveals that obstetric violence is not a fixed or singular concept but an evolving and contested framework shaped by disciplinary perspectives, sociocultural contexts and ideological commitments. Definitions vary widely, with some scholars anchoring the term in the Venezuelan legal definition, while others resist formal definitions altogether, using obstetric violence as a tool to explore structural inequalities and systemic harms. Typologies are used inconsistently, functioning both as descriptive accounts and as structured lists that categorise different forms of harm across fields. We also highlight how universalising tendencies in the literature risk obscuring local realities and how the experiences of gender-diverse populations remain largely absent.

Rather than resolving definitional ambiguity, the literature reveals how such ambiguity reflects the complexity of violence in reproductive healthcare and the different frameworks through which it is understood. Our review highlights that obstetric violence functions as a plural and evolving concept, shaped by varying disciplinary perspectives, social contexts and epistemic assumptions. This pluralism may complicate efforts to define or operationalise the term consistently across academic, legal and policy contexts, but it also reflects the unsettled nature of the field and the diversity of experiences it seeks to capture.