I volunteer for Nueve Lunas, a Oaxacan non-profit with a midwifery school for indigenous youth. I've had the unique opportunity to attend several of their midwifery training workshops.

At a recent midwifery workshop, I was tasked with interpreting for an American Obstetrician who had just moved to Oaxaca and wanted to help with the workshop. As we broke for lunch he spoke with one of the non-profit directors, explaining that he had been volunteering as an obstetrician in a public hospital in Oaxaca.

He said that the Mexican obstetrician with whom he had worked would often sterilize women during cesarean sections, performing tubal ligations without their knowledge or consent, and without advising them afterwards, “but he didn’t charge them,” said the American.

The Mexican obstetrician rationalized that he was doing this for the woman’s own good: she had already had so many babies, she would have consented had her husband not been there to pressure her not to agree to sterilization. Despite the fact that the obstetrician had not talked to these women and knew nothing about them, the American doctor seemed swayed by the Mexican obstetrician’s logic.

Hearing these stories made me feel ill, but not surprised. I began researching the human and reproductive rights violations that took place in hospitals, and they seemed ubiquitous. It became overwhelmingly clear that women’s human and reproductive rights are systematically violated in hospitals throughout the Mexico on a daily basis. I found numerous reports of forced sterilization in Mexico, especially upon poor and indigenous women.

For example, beginning in 1998 numerous Indigenous Mexican women receiving services at an Omaha, Nebraska clinic learned that they had been sterilized or had an Intra-Uterine Device (IUDs) inserted without their knowledge while living in Mexico. Another report I found documented 200 cases of forced sterilization of women in the state of Puebla, between 1994 and 2000. In Veracruz there have been documented cases of women deceived into getting sterilizations, told that they would die if they had another child, or that they would receive a free operation to prevent cervical cancer, neither of which was true. Even the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor acknowledges that there have been numerous complaints of forced sterilization of women in Mexico. The actual number of women who have been sterilized is impossible to tell, as it is grossly underreported.

These accounts of human and reproductive rights abuses by medical professionals highlight the institutionalized violence against women by the medical establishment. Medical professionals create an atmosphere of disrespect during hospital births, which make more grave violations of human rights possible, if not likely. Much like in an abusive intimate relationship, doctors use different tactics in order to maintain power and control in the doctor/patient relationship: emotional abuse, blaming, withholding information, marginalizing women throughout the birth process, coercing women to have IUDs implanted or be sterilization.