Regulating Traditional Mexican Midwifery: Practices of Control, Strategies of Resistance

ABSTRACT

The institutionalization of Mexican midwifery has a long history. Despite global recommendations moving away from training traditional midwives, training courses still continue. Based on fieldwork in the State of Chiapas, I argue that while ongoing trainings offered to traditional midwives in Mexico aim at teaching them best practices, they also limit midwives’ autonomy and keep poor women’s reproductive behaviors under control. I demonstrate how midwives and medical personnel mobilize discourses of reproductive risk, women’s rights and indigenous cultural rights to reinforce or contest mechanisms of reproductive governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexico
• childbirth
• human rights
• indigenous rights
• midwifery
• reproductive governance

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the research participants: midwives, medical personnel, OMIECH members, women, and men who shared their stories. Thank you to my co-editor Elyse Singer, and to the participants of our 2016 AAA panel, which led to this special issue. Thank you to Susannah Daniels for her careful editing and suggestions and to the three anonymous reviewers who contributed to strengthen this article.

Notes

1. All participants have been given pseudonyms.

2. The 2016 Health Law Reform distinguishes between traditional midwives (who “belong to indigenous and rural communities and who have been trained and practice the traditional model of care in pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum and newborn”) and technical midwives (“person who graduated from midwifery schools, whose title is recognized by competent educational authorities”) (Secretaría de Gobernación 2016). To date, there are two state-recognized midwifery schools. The graduates are considered parteras técnicas, “technical” or “skilled” midwives and are authorized to work in public and private settings. For more information, see Dixon (2015).

3. Available at http://dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5092132&fecha=31/05/2009

4. Few of these women have completed high school. Nationwide, about half of Mexican women between 16–19 years old are still in school; in Chiapas, only about 40% are. Nearly a quarter of women age 15 and older in Chiapas are not literate (INEGI 2013).

5. The report of parteras’ activity is also widespread in Guatemala (Cosminsky 2016)

6. Carlita’s story appears in greater details in El Kotni and Ramírez-Pérez (2017)

7. Interview with Vanessa Céspedes, April 17, 2015.

Additional information

Funding

While conducting fieldwork, the author benefitted from a University of Albany Dissertation Fellowship Award. The Institute for Mesoamerican Studies’ DeCormier Scholarship and the University of Albany Benevolent Association Award contributed to funding preliminary fieldwork.

Notes on contributors

Mounia El Kotni

Mounia El Kotni is postdoctoral research associate at the State University at Albany, SUNY. She has worked on different research projects involving women’s health and human rights in France, the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala.