Introduction: Special Issue: Reproduction, Contraception, and Obstetrics in Modern Mexico

Abstract

IntroductionSpecial Issue: Reproduction, Contraception, and Obstetrics in Modern Mexico Laura Shelton (bio) and Martha Liliana Espinosa Tavares, Special Issue Guest Editors (bio) This Special Issue elucidates how Mexican obstetricians, mothers, feminists, scientists, and politicians understood the intersections of reproduction and birth control with the politics of national identity and modernization over the course of a century. Each article investigates these changes within a global context, given that Mexican women and men working in and advocating for reproductive health participated in transnational networks that mobilized concerns about pronatalism, eugenics, sexuality, and population control. Several authors examine how foreign mediators and international foundations rooted in the United States and Europe became involved in Mexico's politics of reproduction. Collectively, these works underscore how views of reproduction intertwine with nationalist projects and patriarchal systems. These works interrogate the continued legacies of colonialism and eugenics on the contours of public debates about family planning in Mexico. Despite these public debates, Mexican women worked to exercise control over their reproductive capacities by gaining access to abortions, contraceptives, and securing the material conditions necessary to raise the number of children they desired. The articles that comprise this special issue will be relevant for anyone interested in the contested arenas of gender and reproductive health, since they offer contextualized analyses of the heated debates over abortion, contraception, motherhood, and economic justice characteristic of the current global political landscape. The particularities of Mexico, however, should draw the attention of a broader audience. Although Mexico is the country with the second-largest number of Catholics in the world (and it has powerful "pro-life" evangelical movements, such as the Frente Nacional por la Familia), this did not prevent the country's Supreme Court from establishing a historical precedent in September 2021, when it declared the criminalization of elective abortion in the northern state of Coahuila unconstitutional. The nationwide Mexican feminist movement celebrated this decision, while also recognizing that the full attainment of reproductive rights in Mexico is still far off on the horizon, considering that, as of today, voluntary abortion is legal in only five out of thirty-two Mexican states. How can we understand such a convoluted context? How to make sense of the history of fertility control and obstetrics in a country where popular Catholicism has coexisted with secular and highly nationalistic governments, and in which any foreign intervention, even in the healthcare domain, has been seen with suspicion? The articles that are part of this volume emerge from the need to answer these questions. [End Page 3] Mexico offers a paradigmatic example of how reproductive governance is historically shaped by the dynamic influence of a revolutionary state, the patriarchal and positivist development of medical science, religion, nationalist public health programs, a vocal multicultural and multiracial civil society, transnational organizations and, of course, the very women whose bodies are at stake. Examining the history of reproductive health in Mexico, nonetheless, often requires scholars to draw on documents that men—or foreign women—have authored about Mexican women, a reality that shapes whose voices are centered in the historical narrative. The authors of this collection have thus drawn on correspondence among obstetricians, international foundations, pharmaceutical companies, lawmakers, and feminist organizations to examine the emergence of obstetrics as a modernizing profession and the influence of international foundations and foreign doctors on debates about reproductive healthcare and birth control. Searching for women's agency in these historical records sometimes necessitates finding the contours of women's voices indirectly through their actions and their resistance to projects of pronatalism and population control. Clinical records, for example, reveal how women from all classes actively sought out newly available oral contraceptives while avoiding clinics devoted strictly to teaching the rhythm method, demonstrating initiative to control their reproductive destinies by electing birth control methods of their own choosing, independent of the Catholic Church's teachings and state policies that limited access to birth control. Obstetrics nurses' work and experience remained absent from medical residents' clinical notes, even as medical school correspondence underscored the profound influence nurses exercised over the practical training obstetrics residents received in maternity ward hospitals. The authors of this special issue reveal the ongoing battle on the part of male...