ABSTRACT
Human rights values offer a moral and legal mechanism for challenging dehumanised practice in childbirth. While the traditional legal response to damage in childbirth is reactive and focused on individual culpability for harm, legal claims for violation of rights recognise harms beyond the physical and can create accountability for damage to a person’s dignity. Human rights can be used proactively to ensure appropriate and respectful services, as well as to support claims for compensation for harm. The nature of human rights analysis, incorporating questions of necessity and proportionality, enables sophisticated consideration of a panoply of rights and responsibilities and potential justification for restrictions on rights. The chapter explores the application of human rights law in recent legal cases from the United Kingdom and the European Court of Human Rights. It considers developments in the law of informed consent in the United Kingdom and the transformation of the legal environment towards supported autonomy, in which the role of the clinician is to facilitate autonomous decision-making. It explains how the legal imperative that emerges from the human rights analysis creates an obligation to provide respectful and personalised care and offers a powerful response to dehumanisation in childbirth.
