Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the historiography of midwifery and reproduction from which this book draws and presents the work’s central arguments: that ideals of sexual honor became imperative for an increased sector of Mexico’s female population as the nineteenth century progressed, that reproduction became a matter of public concern in republican Mexico that diverged from childbirth’s private nature in the colonial era, and that unlike in Anglo America or much of western Europe, in Mexico the professionalization of medicine did not involve the obliteration of midwifery or of pre-Columbian medical practices at least through the nineteenth century. The introduction also provides an overview of the extant statistical overview of changes in birth rates, neonatal mortality, and maternal mortality in Mexico across time, and discusses the sources, organizational logic, and methodological parameters of the book.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter considers what insights Mexico’s reproductive history may have for a current readership. It argues that this history demonstrates that the relative autonomy with which Mexican women pursued reproductive choices in the colonial era serves as a check to the assumption that women in our contemporary period experience greater self-determination than they have ever done in the past. This history also reveals that colonial populations held different perceptions of both biological maters, like conception and amenorrhea, and idealizations of maternity from those we currently hold. These episodes which show dramatic change across time illustrate how changing national circumstances contribute to the construction of both medical knowledge and emotional ideals often considered natural and unchanging.

Monstrous Births

This chapter uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century news publications, medical periodicals, and an 1895 catalogue of birth anomalies from Mexico’s National Museum of History to study evolving ideas about birth monstrosity. In the late colonial period, Mexicans understood anomalous births as evidence of New Spain’s prodigious fertility, a perspective that reflected both the particularized manner in which the Enlightenment developed in Mexico and the late colonial development of “creole patriotism”. Nineteenth-century reports of monstrous births revealed some changes. The later notices conveyed popular attitudes of revulsion and horror toward birth monsters. Second, whereas the late colonial notices restricted speculation as to the origins of unusual infants to “the rare effects of nature,” by the late nineteenth century, scientists and physicians, particularly obstetrician Juan María Rodrígez, turned their focus directly onto (and into) the bodies of the mothers who had produced such phenomena. They increasingly monitored the biological conditions of aberrant embryos’ development in the female uterus. This view allowed for the possible biological regeneration of monstrous productions but also contributed to the construction of the inherent pathology of Mexican women’s reproductive anatomy.

Contraception and Abortion

This chapter uses ethnohistorical accounts, medical texts, legal codes, and criminal and Inquisition records to trace both practices and attitudes toward abortion and contraception in Mexico beginning in the pre-Columbian era and carrying through the nineteenth century. In the colonial period, Mexican midwives employed a variety of medicinal substances, particularly the flowering plant cihuapatli, to assist women in regulating their pregnancies while neither state nor medical authorities did little to regulate their use. Although colonial law condemned abortion, Mexican communities condoned or ignored women’s use of both contraception and abortion. In the wake of the country’s establishment of the first national penal code in 1871, however, denunciations for the crime of abortion dramatically increased. The growing penalization of abortion is also apparent in the agents of institutional medicine’s increased efforts in the century and a half after 1750 to limit women’s use of pre-Columbian abortifacients.

The Evolution of Virginity

This chapter traces change and continuity in the discourse and practice of virginity through colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico by studying religious tracts, medical texts, and criminal trials. Particular attention is paid to the testimony that Mexican midwives supplied about virginity to criminal courts. Colonial Mexicans primarily associated virginity with Catholic symbolism and expressed uncertainty about the confirmation of biological virginity. In this era, the cessation of menstruation might indicate pregnancy, but might also indicate various other medical conditions which could be alleviated through the ingestion of socially sanctioned menstrual regulators. The late nineteenth century marked the emergence of a scientific discourse that posited an impartial and empirical means to establish “biological virginity,” particularly in the research of physician Francisco Flores’ study of the Mexican hymen. Evidence from criminal trials and secondary literature also reveals a change across time whereby by the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of lower class Mexican women purportedly adopted the imperative of preserving virginity prior to marriage than had done so in the colonial era.

Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Birth

This chapter uses institutional medical records, medical texts, and inquisition and criminal trials to track the evolution of obstetrical medicine from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. It argues that the colonial state and colonial Mexicans considered childbirth a private and unremarkable matter. One important exception involved the colonial state and church’s late eighteenth-century promotion of caesarian sections, undertaken to baptize newborns caught in the wombs of women who died during childbirth. Childbirth transformed to become an event of intense public concern by the close of the nineteenth century. This is evident in the new prominence of nationalist obstetrical medicine, the establishment of maternity hospitals, and the prominent discussions of childbirth that appeared in popular news and scientific publications from the mid nineteenth century onward. Mexico’s experience of the professionalization of obstetrics presents some counternarratives to the prevalent story of the modernization of childbirth in other contexts whereby physicians wrested control over childbirth from traditional midwives. While it would be distortive to present midwife- physician relations in Mexico as exclusively harmonious, neither were their interactions always characterized by unilateral domination.

Infanticide

This chapter uses criminal cases, legal codes, and newspaper coverage to track Mexicans’ changing attitudes toward the crime of infanticide from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. While rarely denounced during the colonial era, when those convicted of infanticide would theoretically be sentenced with the death penalty, denunciations for the crime skyrocketed at the close of the nineteenth century at the same time as sentences were reduced to imprisonment. This chapter argues that the rise in denunciations reflects a change in popular conceptions of maternity and of female honor rather than merely a shift in the Porfirian state’s increased vigilance about policing the criminal acts of Mexican society’s lower orders. Although conviction rates also rose in later periods, Mexican justices most often absolved those suspected of the crime due to insufficient evidence.

Conception and Pregnancy

This chapter surveys the ideas and practices surrounding conception and pregnancy that circulated in colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico. It demonstrates that knowledge of these subjects remained relatively stable across time and that midwives persisted as the most frequent providers of health care to women during pregnancy despite the emergence of a small cadre of professional obstetricians at the end of the colonial period. Early ethnohistorical records, inquisition files, and criminal cases record the extent of the persistence of pre-Columbian medical knowledge about pregnancy and conception through the colonial period, including the persistence of pregnant women’s use of Nahua temazcal baths. One changing development over time was the rise in the nineteenth century of claims to medical certainty about the determination of whether conception had occurred. This chapter also provides a qualitative and quantitative portrait of the racial, economic, and civil status of Mexican midwives and assesses public perceptions of these women whom Mexicans of various strata tended to hold in high regard, even in the context of the ever-increasing state initiatives to professionalize midwifery.