Touching Bellies, Touching Lives: Midwives of Southern Mexico Tell Their Stories

When I got there, I found the girl lying on the floor, naked and screaming, with the baby's foot sticking out. Judy Gabriel gives humble, authentic voice to the personal experiences and practices of scores of traditional midwives in rural Mexico. The midwives talk about their childhoods, marriages, losses, rituals, and techniques. The rich narratives describe childbirth before modern medicine redefined it. Intended to engage, enrich, and inspire, Gabriel's work tells of the women who received generations of babies into their hands when knowledge about childbirth came from women's bodies, from instinct, from dreams, and from other women. The stories unfold in the context of high-intervention obstetrics and soaring Cesarean rates, a world that often degrades women and violates the sanctity of birth. For college instructors, an ideal supplemental text for courses in cultures of Mesoamerica; the anthropology of reproduction, midwifery, and birth; medical or biological anthropology; and midwifery practice in historical and cross-cultural context. Titles of related interest also from Waveland Press: Davis-Floyd, Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (ISBN 9781478633624); Davis-Floyd-Cheyney, Birth in Eight Cultures (ISBN 9781478637905); Holloway, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali (ISBN 9781577664352) and Jordan (rev. Davis-Floyd), Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States, Fourth Edition (ISBN 9780881337174). Read more