Between Cut and Consent: Indigenous Women's Experiences of Obstetric Violence in Mexico

Abstract

In an effort to improve health outcomes, the proportion of hospital-attended births has been on the rise in Mexico since the 1990s, resulting in an increased medicalization of reproductive health. Ethnographic research in southern Mexico highlights women and Indigenous midwives' ambivalence about “being cut.” While “being cut” can refer to procedures such as episiotomies or cesarean sections, it also stands for Indigenous and poor women's multiple experiences of frustration, mistreatment, and violence during childbirth. I argue that such violence can only be fully understood when examining the conditions shaping women's consent through an intersectional lens, to include a failure to value poor women's desires, whose silenced voices exist at the intersection of multiple oppressions.