Rural Women, Midwives, and the Mexican Health System

Abstract

The Mexican health system was designed according to the Western model, which places emphasis on curative instead of preventive medicine. Nevertheless, the inclusion of midwives in maternalchild health care and family planning programs in various publich health agencies is an exception in governmental health policies. In this article, the author examines the importance of midwives by analyzing which rural women resort to their services. This study underlines the fact that illiterate poor women with children living in remote, isolated areas, rely on the services of midwives. The need this sector of the population has for access to the services of midwives makes government programs that much more important, constituting the only case in which these traditional practitioners have been incorporated into modern health care. However, in order to implement programs capable of offering rural women the benefits of both health systems, the inclusion of these traditional midwives calls not only for an iprovement of their skills in modern antiseptic techniques, but also for an acknowledgment of the contributions made by traditional health practices and research into the elements and practices for fomenting an understanding of them.