The Evolution and Oppression of Midwifery: Unveiling Ancient Wisdom and Perinatal Human Rights

2023-11-03 03:00:17

The origin of midwives dates back to ancient times. Her predecessors were skilled healing women, respected and required by the community. They might share their roots with current rural doctors, general practitioners, and gynecologists, with nurses and pediatric doctors, and even with veterinarians.

This was the initiation of many midwives since time immemorial. But with the advent of ‘modern’ Western societies, midwifery was swallowed up by changes in social structuring and (re-)organisation. From empiricist she became ‘educated’, from trade to profession, from learning transferred in lineage, tradition and her own experience of giving birth to her own children to teaching in Study Houses of young virgins with a long way to go, from from the countryside to the city, from the knowledge of the medicines of the territories (plants, foods, healthy habits and customs for the body and the individual and collective spirit) to the use of pills for anything, from waiting for the times comforting, encouraging, cooking, knitting to the impatience of intravenous drips to speed up labor, from observing signs of progress to the mechanized blindness of repeated vaginal examinations, dilating the cervix with the fingers, breaking the bag of waters, doing bid quickly; from the wisdom that she knows and understands of the complexity in bio-psycho-social health processes to the complete ignorance of psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology.

The midwife, from being respected and recognized as a ‘medicine woman’, shaman, healer, curandera, facilitating and ensuring the sexual and reproductive health of the people of the community, even the animals, to being invisible behind the Medical Corps and a white duster. From being free, autonomous and sovereign to being exploited, oppressed and functional within a medical-hegemonic system of dictatorial hierarchy and more or less explicit or covert structural violence, in the abuse of interventions, instrumentalization of bodies and violence. obstetric, a faithful reflection, for example, in the epidemic of cesarean sections and genital mutilations such as cuts in the vagina, vulva and perineum that are routine in ‘normal’ births.

Two forces pulling. One using the midwife as an instrument of social control, the other as a threat to it. Being in itself free or prey. It is evident in health statistics that their slavery enslaves others. A clear example is private hospitals where the cesarean section rate is 70-90%. And their independence in home births only requires 4-6% of cesarean sections. What is at stake is who occupies the center and whose interests take precedence.

People versus corporate medical millionaire cis-theme. A force that aims to extinguish these women who empower others in the peak experience of giving birth by their own means, displaying their full potential, subordinating them with the promise of an empty label in the best style of Chespirito- ¨Digame Bachelor¨, tempted with being a pawn of the biological health system. The one that wants to enclose such a profession in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, denaturalizing it in the likeness of the technocratic paradigm of machine-bodies, the one that places midwives as ‘collaborators’ of the Art of Healing, the one that turns its back on the knowledge and skills protected and applied for centuries, which seeks to bind them with laws and with persecutions in the Criminal Courts denounced by the oppressive apparatus with the aim of restricting their actions and in this way indirectly coerce the people assisted by denying them perinatal, diverse and intercultural human rights, regarding ‘How, where and with whom to give birth.’

But there is another force, which survived the ‘Holy Inquisition’ Witch Hunt during the Dark Ages that murdered hundreds of thousands. Extreme example of what medical power can do when it can lose its power overshadowed by these sage-femmes (read ‘wise women’), their knowledge and medicines, unlike the bloodletting and poisons used by the doctors of that time. (and of the present), for being rivals and competition, for being suitable despite being illiterate, for being women, peasants, indigenous, black, non-Catholic, immoral, subversive. That goes beyond the limited approach that focuses solely on biology, separating the person from their totality. A force that silent, invisible, like the dandelion, the chamomile, the calanchoe, the fern, the mint, the wachuma (the San Pedro of colonization) makes its way, even if it is uprooted. It remains despite failed attempts over the centuries to exterminate it like a weed. Making resistance to a paradigm that sooner or later will perish. A force that shelters and preserves this ancient ancient wisdom, which understands that its existence exceeds medical, educational, legal and legal validation and recognition. Guardian of the threshold of Life and Death. Cleaning feces and vomit. So small and so immense. So nothing and so everything at the same time.

*Midwife, perinatal human rights activist, justice assistant, TEDx Speaker.

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