From the Back Cover
This ambitious sourcebook surveys both the traditional basis for and the present state of indigenous women's reproductive health in Mexico and Central America. Noted practitioners, specialists, and researchers take an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the multiple barriers for access and care to indigenous women that had been complicated by longstanding gender inequities, poverty, stigmatization, lack of education, war, obstetrical violence, and differences in language and customs, all of which contribute to unnecessary maternal morbidity and mortality. Emphasis is placed on indigenous cultures and folkways--from traditional midwives and birth attendants to indigenous botanical medication and traditional healing and spiritual practices--and how they may effectively coexist with modern biomedical care. Throughout these chapters, the main theme is clear: the rights of indigenous women to culturally respective reproductive health care and a successful pregnancy leading to the birth of healthy children.
A sampling of the topics:
- Motherhood and modernization in a Yucatec village
- Maternal morbidity and mortality in Honduran Miskito communities
- Solitary birth and maternal mortality among the Rarámuri of Northern Mexico
- Maternal morbidity and mortality in the rural Trifino region of Guatemala
- The traditional Ngäbe-Buglé midwives of Panama
- Characterizations of maternal death among Mayan women in Yucatan, Mexico
- Unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and unmet need in Guatemala
Maternal Death and Pregnancy-Related Morbidity Among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America is designed for anthropologists and other social scientists, physicians, nurses and midwives, public health specialists, epidemiologists, global health workers, international aid organizations and NGOs, governmental agencies, administrators, policy-makers, and others involved in the planning and implementation of maternal and reproductive health care of indigenous women in Mexico and Central America, and possibly other geographical areas.
David Schwartz, MD, MS Hyg, FCAP, has an educational background in anthropology, medicine, public health, and epidemiology. He specializes in obstetrical and perinatal pathology and medical epidemiology, and has a professional interest in reproductive health, maternal disease, and maternal death in both resource-rich and resource-poor countries. Dr. Schwartz has organized and directed large national and international investigations of women's health, obstetrical disease, and perinatal pathology and epidemiology for many government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and several foreign governments, and has consulted and taught in these specialties in resource-poor nations. He has conducted extensive research in obstetrical pathology, and has been the recipient of grants from the NIH, CDC, and the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. He has a new multi-authoredtextbook regarding maternal morbidity and mortality in developing nations that was published in October 2015, and was previously a co-editor of an award-winning 2-volume medical textbook on infectious and tropical diseases. He has authored 119 peer-reviewed articles as well as 47 chapters in his specialty areas in the peer-reviewed medical literature. Dr. Schwartz is an experienced editor, currently serving on the Editorial Boards of three major international journals, and as an associate editor for one of them. He has previously taught at several universities, and is currently clinical professor of Pathology at the Georgia Regents University-Medical College of Georgia. He is also a member of the Directors Council of the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he additionally serves on the Scholarly Activities Committee.
