The voice of non-specialist women in (co)authoring birth plans: strategies for accessing genre writing

Abstract

The birth plan serves as an instrument of protection against obstetric violence, enabling pregnant women to make informed decisions about the childbirth process. However, not all women can create such plans on their own; therefore, certain agents provide pre-constructed birth plans for the parturient women to fill out. This work aims to analyze the strategies used by the empirical authors of two birth plans to facilitate the involvement of non-specialist women in the construction of these plans. In this qualitative-interpretative research, we employed Sociodiscursive Interactionism (SDI) as our theoretical-methodological framework, using the textual layer categories (Bronckart, 2012). We observed that the linguistic-discursive structuring of the plans aims to empower non-specialist women to act in relation to their reproductive rights and health, providing them with the necessary information to understand the processes and procedures related to childbirth, thus contributing to their health literacy. Furthermore, we observed the orchestration of different voices, which either merge with the woman’s voice or are muted in the texts, ultimately positioning her as the final (co)author of these plans, thus enabling the literacy necessary for exercising her citizenship and her repositioning as an agent in the birth care scenario.