When Doctor Becomes Priest: Maternal Health Sidelined, Overmedicalization Ritualized

Obstetricians play a crucial role, yes, especially in high-risk pregnancies. But must every birth pass through the hospital assembly line? Is an obstetrician truly necessary for a no risk, healthy pregnancy? Do all pregnant women need IV drips, hospital beds, and steel tools to bring a child into this world?

In India, a doctor is often seen as the final word on the body. There’s an ingrained cultural logic to this. After all, they’re trained medically. They wear a stethoscope. They prescribe, diagnose, and decide. In a country still tangled in faith and authority, the doctor becomes the secular priest.

I know this firsthand. When I came out as queer, my family took me to a doctor. Not primarily to “correct me”, but because of the deep-rooted belief that the body needs a doctor’s endorsement. If something felt different, physically or emotionally, there had to be a diagnosis. Homosexuality, by that logic, was a bodily issue. A doctor, then, had to confirm whether or not I was, in fact, gay. Of course, my story is not the subject here. But it illustrates a larger cultural condition: that we see the doctor not just as a healer, but as an authority figure whose word supersedes all others.

This reverence becomes problematic when it blinds us to the fact that doctors don’t know everything. Or worse, that the medicine they practice is not as neutral as we think.

After completing a course in Global Quality Maternal and Newborn Care from Yale University, I was stunned at what I learned. Today, pregnancy, one of the most natural biological processes, is increasingly treated as a medical emergency. Women are hooked up to machines, coerced into use of synthetic oxytocin to speed up labor, and rushed into C-sections, often without informed consent. The message is clear: birth is a medical problem, and only a doctor can solve it.

But this isn’t medicine. This is overmedicalization, especially when unnecessary.

Obstetricians play a crucial role, yes, especially in high-risk pregnancies. But must every birth pass through the hospital assembly line? Is an obstetrician truly necessary for a no risk, healthy pregnancy? Do all pregnant women need IV drips, hospital beds, and steel tools to bring a child into this world?

We’ve stopped asking these questions. Patients no longer feel they have the right to. And doctors; especially those working within large, privately-run medical institutions; operate within systems driven by profit. Every C-section, every medicalised intervention, every extended hospital stay feeds a balance sheet. That’s the brutal reality. Hospitals are businesses. And doctors, however well-meaning, are employees of these capitalistic institutions whose primary aim is to generate profit. I will deliberately not share data and statistics, because it is depressing. Let us base this draft on our lived experiences. Do we even know one woman who has given birth today without overmedicalization? I certainly don't. 

Enter the Midwife: A Profession We Forget Exists

The quiet wisdom of midwives is ignored or in many cases they don't exist as professionals. Don't worry, I am not hankering for the days of Ayas and Dai Mas. Although I must confess that their wisdom far exceeds modern medicine as a scientific profession, if time and experience were to be considered variables. But nonetheless, a midwife is a trained professional, educated in midwifery as per a global framework by WHO in collaboration with UNFPA, UNICEF, and ICM. She is a professional. Not trained less, only trusted less.

The world over, trained midwives have been shown to improve maternal and neonatal outcomes, especially for low-risk pregnancies. Their model is based on continuity of care, patient respect, emotional support, and non-invasive methods. Yet in India, they are largely invisible in our healthcare imagination. Only in 2023 did the Indian legislature pass the Nurses and Midwifery Act, giving legal recognition to midwifery. A long-overdue step, but far from enough.

We don’t just need new laws. We need a shift in perception as well. Midwives must be recognised as professionals in their own right, not as substitutes for doctors, but as care experts equipped to handle normal pregnancies. Obstetricians, on their part, must also learn to let go. Not every birth requires their intervention. Stepping back in no-risk cases doesn’t threaten their importance; it preserves healthcare resources for those who actually need them.

Because here’s the other thing we don’t talk about: hospital beds in India are limited. Every unnecessary admission for a no-risk pregnancy takes up space in a system already overburdened. I’m not asking for pregnant women to be sacrificed at the altar of system efficiency. I’m merely asking: Did she need a hospital bed in the first place? Did she need a C-section at all?

The truth is, no evidence suggests that the rise of C-section deliveries has reduced the risk of maternal or neonatal mortality. What we have instead is an illustration of a system that doesn’t listen to data, to evidence, or most critically, to the woman herself.

The Quality Maternal and Newborn Care Framework says this clearly: care must be holistic, respectful, and centered around the needs of the mother and the child. The question isn’t just “What’s medically safest?” It is “What does she want?”, “What does she need?” And “Who is helping her make that decision?”

Reproductive health in India cannot be rescued by clinical systems alone. It needs cultural reform, institutional humility, and above all, a radical shift in the perception that pregnant women are people, not patients.

Author’s Note:

As a gay man, I claim no authority over a woman’s reproductive rights. But as someone actively learning how policy shapes lives, I am merely questioning the presuppositions we carry around pregnancy. I most certainly won’t pretend to know what’s best for a woman’s body, but I will ask, why so many others do - especially these temples of profit we call hospitals.