Birth: Between medical and human science

Being born is the most “natural” event (biologically defined) and, at the same time, the most complex event. The progressive medicalization of birth has led to a decreased interest in the lived experience which accompany it. Focusing on the delivery and the way it is conducted from a medical perspective, in a positivist vision, means reduce the existential relevance of childbirth (becoming a parent and caring relationship) to a purely biological reality, to the body-as-organism rather then to the body-as-person. The phenomenological science, investigating sense, pursues a new epistème. The phenomenological method opens new paths to a new form of science which, rather than explain childbirth from a causal point of view, tries to comprehend its sense, connecting it to existential and historical situation, thereby guarding its complexity. Human life as a whole is born from a woman’s body. The maternal body is origin of the “coming into the world”, fundamental element in the relationship between human and medical science, and in the ethics of care.