Nora E. Jaffary. Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905.

Abstract

This important book is the first to examine reproductive discourses and practices in Mexico City and Oaxaca across the “long” nineteenth century. Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 follows the conventional pre-Columbian-colonial-national periodization of Mexican history. Nora E. Jaffary draws on six archives and libraries in Mexico City, four in Oaxaca, and collections at Columbia University and London’s Wellcome Library. Examining documents from abortion and infanticide criminal trials, legislation, published medical and legal tracts from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and nineteenth-century newspapers, Jaffary employs qualitative analysis of exemplary case studies and statistical analysis of abortion and infanticide records. Engaging a wide literature in Mexican history and European comparisons, Jaffary emphasizes change more than continuity regarding attitudes, expectations, and regulations about reproduction, and she shows persistent behaviors of pregnant women of all classes in seeking midwife expertise and regulating pregnancies. Examining discourses of sexual honor, public virtue, and motherhood, the book documents a shift in preoccupation with reproduction, which was first limited mostly to elite Spanish colonial women but by the end of the nineteenth century included all women. In chapter 1, while honor, class, and Christianity together determined elite women’s “social virginity” in the colonial period, during the nineteenth century plebeian women could increasingly claim to be social virgins despite physical evidence precluding “biological virginity” (40). By the late nineteenth century, medical and criminal discourses determined biological virginity, and plebeian women faced greater pressure to adhere to definitions of sexual purity. In chapter 2, Mexican women sought indigenous midwives’ expertise—which drew on pre-Columbian cultural knowledge and practical expertise from years of attending births—about conception and pregnancy throughout the colonial and early national periods. European male physicians entered obstetrics bringing new practices, such as internal examinations and forceps delivery, but did not replace midwives. Professional medical and pharmaceutical manuals from the colonial and national periods shared knowledge on preventing miscarriage, and newspapers increasingly advertised remedies for digestive and other side effects of pregnancy. While male doctors and female midwives competed with each other, Jaffary also finds evidence of cooperation, as with a nineteenth-century Oaxacan law calling for “doctors to learn the art of obstetrics from midwives rather than the other way around” (73).