Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how obstetric violence is embodied and understood by the women who experience it, how it impacts on maternal subjectivity and what the long-term health implications may be.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a qualitative, non-clinical analysis of women’s experiences of obstetric violence in Mexico. Data sources are derived from ethnographic interviews, participant observation and an extensive revision of public reports and policy.
Findings
Local ideas and beliefs over what one must endure to become a “good mother” contribute to how acts of obstetric violence are treated and interpreted by professionals, the community and the individual alike. The ways in which women interpret violence in relation to the wider context of their everyday lives have significant implications for evaluating the effectiveness of approaches to reproductive and maternal health.
Social implications
Situating women’s narratives within an ecological framework of gender-based violence reveals not only the conditions under which obstetric violations occur, but also the forms of resilience and coping mechanisms that women develop. This provides a deeper understanding for the long-term health implications of iatrogenic trauma during pregnancy and birth.
Originality/value
This paper discusses obstetric violence from the perspective of women who experience it and contextualises it within the wider life course approach to personhood and maternal transformation.
This article looks at how the unresolved internal armed conflict in Chiapas intersects with existing structural violence manifest in the everyday forms of harassment, abuse, and violence, all of them shaping the fabric of women’s existence. This includes both the way they are treated by professionals in the healthcare system and unintended consequences of health policy and initiatives to reduce maternal mortality. I argue it is useful to examine these two factors jointly in order to identify a relationship between armed conflict in rural areas and its indirect costs on the nearby urban environment. I will focus on one main point of discussion: the way a health-policy emphasis on decreasing maternal mortality (as an indirect consequence of the armed conflict) is changing how and where urban women give birth, effectively disappearing the role of the urban ‘partera empírica’.
In this article, I discuss a case study from southeast Mexico that highlights conflicting ideas regarding what constitutes risk and illness in the context of breastfeeding and postpartum practices. On the one hand, doctors' indeterminate and conflicting diagnoses about mother's milk as a source of pollution is revealed as an act of moral pathology that frames young mothers as high risk. On the other hand, milk pollution is understood by women as an unwelcome yet temporary interruption that can be remedied through non-allopathic intervention. As such, women can exert collective agency to overcome medicalized barriers to early breastfeeding and maintain established nurturing practices. [breastfeeding, postpartum, pollution, Mexico, risk]
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