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Every woman has the right to the highest attainable standard of health, which includes the right to respectful maternity care [1]. We—as pregnant and birthing individuals and the care providers, public health professionals, and researchers serving them—know instinctually what constitutes dignified treatment. Yet the systems and structures within which we birth and work are not designed to ensure respectful, evidence-based care. To help the reader see this more clearly, we invite you to do a thought experiment. Imagine you are a woman in labour. You come to a facility in order to receive quality obstetric care. What type of treatment would you expect? Timely attention? Clear and detailed information from a caring health provider about what to expect and why? Recognition of your role as an active decision-maker and protagonist in your own birthing experience, with the choice to consent to or refuse any procedures once you understand them and their implications? Perhaps having a chosen companion with you at all times or deciding on birth position(s) based on your own comfort? Or maybe having the privacy to experience your newborn’s first hours without sharing a bed with a stranger? What other expectations would you have? Viewed in this way, conceptualizing dignified treatment is simple. Yet such timely, respectful and consensual obstetric care is not the norm in many healthcare settings across the globe. There is a wide-spread belief that ensuring safe birth requires placing the needs and priorities of health providers over those of birthing women. This sets up and perpetuates a power imbalance, privileging providers and contributing to obstetric violence. The power imbalance between women and providers is echoed and exacerbated by similar power dynamics between providers (across cadre and seniority) that can produce counterproductive and even toxic interactions between

Every woman in the world must have respectful care during childbirth: a reflection