By Andrea I recently attended a talk on midwifery organized by Benito Juarez University during a week of women’s rights workshops. Nueve Lunas, an NGO dedicated to promoting and teaching midwifery in Oaxaca, and where I am currently working as a volunteer, was asked to present on the topic. The director of the organization, a midwife herself, and one of the midwifery students from Nueve Lunas’ school came to discuss midwifery with university students and other interested parties. After a half hour of figuring out which room we were supposed to be in, people started to trickle in. We sat in a circle and began with introductions explaining why we had decided to come to the talk and what questions we had about midwifery. Having spent a fair about of time talking to midwives and generally being immersed in the midwifery world-view, I was shocked by several of the responses I heard. The first woman to speak, a young doctor, explained that she was having a hard time getting women to lie down and stay on their backs with their legs in stirrups during labor and complained that women weren’t letting her check their cervix to see how dilated they were. She wanted to know why people weren’t coming to birth in the clinic like they should. Another woman, the coordinator of the event- who had earlier mentioned that she thought the subject was fascinating- said that she had recently attended a birth of a woman she didn’t know, where the birthing woman refused to lie down and insisted on pulling on a rope suspended from the ceiling while pushing. (A position that facilitates the pushing process because it engages the diaphragm while squatting). The woman telling us this was totally disgusted by the event and was further frustrated when the mother wouldn’t even let her film the birth. She kept repeating that she had found the birth totally ugly (“feo, muy feo”). Another woman explained that she found it irresponsible that a woman would go to a midwife who was “supposedly” trained in attending births, when a clinic would have obstetricians and pediatricians working as a team ready to dispense of high quality health care without any of the danger of home births. (Note- she has not had children or the misfortune of having to birth in a clinic.) The second woman agreed, reiterating that birth was dangerous and risky and should be practiced with obstetricians (literal meaning of “obstetrician”: to stand in front of) rather than midwives (literal meaning of “midwife”: to be with woman). I wondered why these women had come, what had they wanted to hear? A couple of other people said they were interested in reproductive health and wanted more information. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! How did people come to believe that hospitals were less dangerous and more humane than birthing with midwives at home? To a large extent, racism and sexism are at the heart of this issue; traditional midwives are normally indigenous women and are stereotyped as superstitious and illiterate. During the 1960`s modern medicine sought to take birth out of the hands of indigenous women midwives and into the hands of white, male-dominated medicine. As late as the 1970`s traditional midwives attended 43% of Mexican births, dwindling to 17% by the mid 1990`s. And it’s true that there is reason to be concerned about the risks associated with birth. Oaxaca has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Mexico with 95 maternal deaths per 100,000 whereas the national average is 63.6 per 100,000.

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