Understanding Your Rights during Labor and Delivery

Pregnancy involves many aspects of a woman's life, including options and legal rights, which understanding allows them to access all the information they need to make important birth decisions. If you are pregnant, you know how it feels to undergo frequent tests and prescribed visits to the doctor starting before conceiving and again time after time during gestation and after childbirth.

Some pregnant women develop the sensation to be treated as the container of a new life and not as persons-, Listening to your doctor and following the medical advice in the different aspects of your pregnancy is necessary, however, not to control your life even affecting your individual preferences.

You have the right to control your medical care, and not the medical staff controlling you. Health care providers should give you all the information you need before, during and after your pregnancy, and explain to you the procedures that you do not understand. Once you have the advice and knowledge of a particular situation, it is your right to refuse any care or ask for modification to the proposed plan.

"Informed Consent" is a basic medical rule granting the patients an absolute right to be informed about any proposed treatment, explaining in a non-medical terminology the care, risks involved and alternatives, before agreeing with it. Once you agree with a medical plan, your doctor should explain you the procedures and medications given, including benefits and risks for you, as well as any associated negative effect on your baby.

At the hospital, the staff can suggest what you should wear or where your partner needs to be during labor and delivery, but not forcing you, if you do not feel comfortable with their recommendations. However, a health care provider cannot hold back information to avoid making you feel uncomfortable, or for any other reason. From the first visit to the doctor to the arrival to the hospital, you have the right to refuse the treatment.

Ethics are important, because some women are not interested in informed consent, in the belief that pregnancy should be taken as it comes. However, many health care providers refuse to provide their services to those women. Even when the chances of complications or risk factors would not exist, a woman who ignores the procedures involved with her pregnancy usually ends up dissatisfied with the medical care.

Along with informed consent, there are other rights and option you should know, including emergencies, consent forms, and refusing treatment. When you give birth at a hospital, you can sign a consent form to receive attention, after reading it carefully, but you can also walk out of a hospital at any time, refusing treatment.

However, keep in mind that your insurance may not be covered if your pregnancy faces complications. Changing doctors or leaving the hospital is your right, but the carrier's contract may include clauses related to medical advice (AMA) that may nullify the contract or determined coverage.