Epidural Injustice

In Australia and New Zealand midwives and anaesthetists generally provide an excellent labour analgesia service. However, subtle and usually unconscious deprioritising of labour analgesia over other immediate duties, or an unjustified regard for the pain of labour as somehow different to other causes of acute severe pain, can occasionally manifest in delays administering epidural pain relief. In addition, very rarely, practitioners may explicitly argue that their personal conception of beneficence is strong enough to override an autonomous woman’s desire for epidural analgesia in labour. In this presentation I argue that, in addition to the common ethical questions around informed consent in the throes of labour, questions of justice and injustice are also prominent.