Childbirth in Hungarian Obstetric Care: Attitudes, Experiences, Inequalities [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Demographic landscapes in Europe have become a key terrain where social anxieties, political projects, and intimate life decisions intersect. Demographic ageing and changing fertility trends characterise much of the world (Cheng et al., 2022), and they are particularly pronounced in Europe (Makay and Ökrös, 2024). The process of population change is usually surrounded by a public discourse of panic and anxiety, often articulated through narratives about national decline. Yet these demographic anxieties are predominantly centred on fertility and reproductive issues rather than on other major dimensions such as ageing and care (Melegh, 2026). When the “demographic crisis” is reduced to the number of births, questions of quality and equitable access tend to remain secondary in public policy and political debates, as does the social organisation of care, despite its centrality to long-term social reproduction. This article-based dissertation starts from the observation that demographic change is also a political and moralised field shaped by hierarchies and socio-political and ideological aims. Within this field, fertility trends and childbearing are not only measured and debated; they are also governed. Welfare-state responses to demographic change are frequently organised through social policy, which often places a strong emphasis on fertility and birth rates. Pronatalist family policies aimed at encouraging childbearing are especially prominent in the Hungarian case (Fodor, 2022; Szikra, 2018a, 2018b; Szikra and Autischer, 2025). In Hungary, pronatalism forms part of a broader normative framing of demographic responsibility and of what legitimate and socially valued family life should look like. This dissertation focuses on childbirth as a particularly revealing site where demographic projects, policy instruments, and institutional realities meet. From this starting point, it foregrounds a central tension between macro-level demographic goals and micro-level experiences of care: how can a state strongly promote childbearing while the institutional conditions under which childbirth takes place remain fragmented, unequal, and at times disrespectful? This is not merely a rhetorical question; it points to a structural contradiction in contexts where childbirth becomes a politically significant event while the organisation of care does not necessarily reflect this significance.