"[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer,
but to improving the health of poor populations in general."--Social
Anthropology
Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high
frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related
causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study
follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá,
Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among
indigenous Mayan women.
The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of
motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the
biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These
incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such
policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural
understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need
to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to
do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally.
From the Introduction:
An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem
is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and
birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our
full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or
the phenomenon itself. Certainly women's survival during childbirth is
the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy
outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on
global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.
