Tech & Rights

Gross Rights Violations Against Pregnant Women in Bulgaria

The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee is asking the European Court of Human Rights to issue interim measures to protect the home delivery of a pregnant woman.

by Bulgarian Helsinki Committee
(Image: Jason Lander)
The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) wants the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to oblige the Bulgarian state not to apply administrative and penal measures against the medics who would assist her forthcoming delivery at home.

The applicant, a woman identified as D, filed an appeal to the Strasbourg court in 2012. It concerns her right as a pregnant mother to choose to give birth outside the hospital – free from harassment, but still receiving the necessary assistance from medical professionals in her home.

Bulgarian legislation prohibits this practice by providing administrative and penal measures against health professionals who support birth outside the hospital.

Severe violations of women's rights

The request, made by the BHC, comes in light of D’s forthcoming childbirth. She has already experienced two births in hospitals, accompanied by coercion and humiliation, and doesn’t want to go trough this again.

The pressure that Bulgarian legislation puts on women to give birth, against their will, in an institutionalized hospital environment where delivery is treated as a medical risk rather than as a natural process, and is managed by doctors against the will and dignity of the woman, as well as against the health needs of her child, is a gross violation of her right to personal and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Painful deliveries

The plaintiff bore her first child in 2008. The birth proceeded under medical practices that she had explicitly refused: the doctors administered Oxytocin and Prostaglandin to stimulate contractions in spite of her desire for a natural birth, and applied the Kristeller maneuver, which resulted in the baby being born with a broken clavicle, a hematoma, and edema in the head.

For her second delivery, in 2012, D did not go to the hospital until it was imminent. She paid a fee of 1,960 lev (€1,000), which was supposed to cover water birth, the presence of the father and a doula during the childbirth. The water birth, however, was a bad experience, accompanied by disputes with the staff about the pose she chose, and other requirements concerning her own body and child.

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