Mexico Announces Plans to Bolster Midwifery and Traditional Medicine Lydia Carey - Mexico News Daily
go to original September 11, 2022

Traditional medicine and midwifery are often the only health care available in Mexico's poor or remote communities, but have been marginalized over decades in the public health system. (UNAM)

Midwifery and traditional medicine practices will soon become more widely available options for patients in the country’s national public health system, two high-level officials announced at a recent President López Obrador daily press conference.

Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) head Zoé Robledo Aburto and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell made the announcement, saying that in Mexico’s recent history, both practices had been greatly diminished and marginalized over the years as options for patients due to their lack of inclusion in the nation’s public health care strategy.

“Mexico’s legal framework is clearly insufficient to promote midwifery. Instead, in the last several decades, the spaces for midwifery have been diminished and its capacities lessened because it wasn’t a practice sufficiently incorporated into the national health system, which has prioritized, instead, a very technical and at times technocratic vision of childbirth,” said López-Gatell.



Indigienous midwives at a center for women in Chiapas (MND)

Community midwives (parteras) and traditional medicine doctors are often the only sources of medical care in poor and isolated communities in Mexico. Many work in rural indigenous communities where distance, language barriers and lack of services leaves community members, women in particular, vulnerable.

Community midwives generally receive no salary and learn their trade from the generational knowledge collected by grandmothers, mothers and mothers-in-law. Although their work saves the lives of countless people every year, their ancestral knowledge and practices are often disrespected and disregarded by mainstream medicine.

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