Pratiche di ordinaria violenza contraccettiva. Il contesto biomedico e l’autodeterminazione riproduttiva tra le donne nahua della Sierra Norte di Puebla, Messico

Abstract

The issue of reproductive rights in the Mexican indigenous context is so relevant that it is considered by the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas as a fundamental indicator of female well-being. Nevertheless, the fully autonomous women’s exercise of their reproductive self-determination, a crucial element of their agency as persons, is often undermined by two main factors. On the one hand, the partners frequently don’t accept the women’s will of planning their pregnancies and prevent them from doing it by taking advantage of their position of power within the domestic gender relations. On the other hand, the hospital medical staff insists on imposing a wide post-partum contraceptive coverage to the patients, in order to achieve the demographic goals of population policies given by the different Secretarías de Salud of the States.

The present article focuses on this second element, and in particular on the contraceptive method most widely used in the indigenous context of my research, namely the female sterilization. More in detail, this paper analyses the decisional process that brings women to choose this kind of contraceptive method. Furthermore, it stresses on how the biomedical influence plays a determinant role in all the circumstances in which the decision to be sterilised is taken. Eventually, the analysis of the hospital procedure to sign the ‘Informed Consent Module’ for the supply of the post-partum contraceptive highlights how women’s will is taken into account only when it is not conflicting either with medical and demographical imperatives or with the partner’s will.