Las midwives They are a fundamental piece for the Health integral of the women and families, are leaders in their communities and are also part of the traditional medicine of health services. HealthTherefore, the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) and the Ministry of Health of Mexico City (Sedesa) recognize their work and make a call to combat stigma.
On the occasion of the International Day of the Midwife, both institutions of Health They highlighted the importance of women dedicated to this work, while the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) called for the promotion of adequate changes to provide care focused on women and their babies, respecting sexual and reproductive rights through the attention of the Model of Professional Midwifery.
UNFPA stressed that if midwives received support from all the governments of the world, by 2035 4.3 million lives would have been saved: 1.9 million stillbirths, which is when the baby dies in utero in the last 20 weeks of pregnancy; 2 million neonatal deaths and 280 thousand maternal deaths.
More than 6 thousand midwives collaborate in the IMSS Welfare
Social Security noted that 6,600 midwives are the cornerstone of the IMSS Bienestar program for the care of pregnant women and newborns.
Martha Elena Celis Téllez, head of the Department of Community Participation of the IMSS, indicated that the midwivesin addition to being leaders in their community, they are part of the traditional medicine of local services and most of them have been working altruistically in the IMSS Welfare program for more than 40 years.
He mentioned that of the 18 states where this strategy is present, Chiapas has the largest population of midwives with 2 thousand 770, followed by Veracruz, Puebla, San Luis Potosí and Oaxaca, where the ages are above 60 years, who in a playful way teach women young people the traditional medicine that is practiced in the communities.
The doctor Celis Téllez stressed that the work of these women It is essential to take care of the Health of the inhabitants in the communities and hoped that “this ancestral profession will not be lost and hopefully we will have more and more midwives traditional”.
They ask to remove the stigma against midwives: “they are professionals, they don’t catch babies”
Ilian Blanco García, Director of Coordination and Sectoral Development of Sedesa, indicated that contrary to what is believed, a midwife is not a woman who helps pregnant women so that their baby born in unhealthy places and without any medical knowledge, on the contrary, she is a professional who accompanies the future mother from the beginning of the gestation process until the end. That is why she emphasized that those who dedicate themselves to this profession should not continue to be stigmatized as “baby chubby”.
“Las midwives They are professionals who work with scientific evidence for the treatment of physiological childbirth and the characteristic of their work is that they provide support and care during the gestation of the pregnancy and continue it during the puerperium and continue to be present in the life of the woman and the child. son or daughter who has been born,” he stressed.
She referred that there are different types of professionalization of this activity, such as nursing and obstetrics graduates who are midwives but who were not recognized as such for a long time.
Blanco García pointed out that the importance of the midwife is that she gives a main place to the woman who gestates, who is autonomous in her processes, is the woman’s companion and not the actor over the woman.
“The midwife has a complex view of the Health and not only of the woman but of the family group and that is something very important, she is a great promoter of Health and reassessing her is key and this is the ideal time to do it because she works with different generations and builds other narratives and that is important, we need a lot of it, and if we had to find a synonym for midwife, it would be ´mother´”, she emphasized Sedesa’s specialist.