“No puedo poner mi embarazo en pausa”. Salud materna durante la pandemia en México

Abstract

I offer a reflection on the challenges and difficulties to give continuity to maternal and neonatal health care and services during 2020 in Mexico; what could be considered the initial stage of the sanitary emergency produced by the SARS-COV-2 virus. The text is based on the ethnographic work carried out with Catalina, a woman who gave birth to her first child, in June 2020 in Mexico City -the country's capital-, four months after the COVID-19 disease was defined as a health event of global proportions. I analyze the overlap between problems prior to the onset of the pandemic - social asymmetries, violence against women and the increase in health services - and the measures generated by state health authorities to control the disease - for example: the mandate government of social isolation and the reconversion of the health system. I argue that it is necessary to reevaluate these measures considering the effects differentiated by gender, age, social class and geographic location. Taking into account the power relations that undermine the construction of pregnant and postpartum women as a “vulnerable” population.