Webinar: Women’s Human Rights in Childbirth in Slovakia and Norway with Focus on the COVID-19 Pandemic
CDA/ODZ, 28. 10. 2021
Webinar Women’s Human Rights in Childbirth in Slovakia and Norway with Focus on the COVID-19 Pandemic held on 28 October 2021 was organised by Citizen, Democracy and Accountability (CDA, Bratislava, Slovakia) in cooperation with the Institute of Nursing and Health Promotion at Faculty of Health Science, OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University (Oslo, Norway). The group of participants was quite diverse ranging from practicing professionals in the field of midwifery, teachers and researchers from academia to activists from non-governmental organisations.
Presentations opening the webinar were focused mostly on childbirth experience, human rights and institutional and state accountability as the cross-cutting issues and the principles grounding the research work. They served as the introductions to the contexts in Slovakia and Norway.
The webinar further presented a number of unique outcomes of several pieces of research concerning human rights and their violations in the provision of childbirth care during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the outcomes of a recent validation study of the Childbirth Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) in Slovakia.
One of the presentations predominantly concentrated a survey carried out during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic with emphasis on violations of the human rights of women in the provision of childbirth care in healthcare facilities in Slovakia. The other two introduced the outcomes of an in-depth fact-finding into institutional (non-)acting in Slovakia that has revealed from the recent CDA monitoring activities. While the first presentation was focused on the practical implementation of the right to a birth companion of a woman´s choosing, the second one was dealing with the handling of women´s complaints on human rights violations in childbirth care by hospitals and state bodies in charge during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The event was prepared and implemented in the framework of the project Let’s Take the Needs of Women in Childbirth Seriously! Promoting Women’s Human Rights in Public Policies in the Field of Health supported by the ACF – Slovakia programme, financed from the EEA Financial Mechanism 2014 – 2021. The programme is managed by the EKOPOLIS Foundation in partnership with Nadácia otvorenej spoločnosti – Open Society Foundation (NOS – OSF) and the Carpathian Foundation.
