New Public Midwifery School Opens in Southern Mexico
Yesterday, WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, aired a story, Mexico Aims To Save Babies And Moms With Modern Midwifery, about a new public midwifery school in southern Mexico. The goal of the new school is to increase the number of trained maternal health care providers across the country and to boost access to maternal health services in difficult-to-reach areas of the country. From the story:
In Mexico these days, the majority of babies are born in hospitals. That hasn’t helped reduce the number of maternal deaths, though. So health officials are re-making the centuries-old tradition of midwifery. They are betting a new kind of midwife, one trained in a clinical setting, can offer a solution. At a newly opened school in southern Mexico, young women sit up straight in tiny desks and answer their teacher’s questions in chorus. Their round brown faces and thick black hair are typical of this mostly indigenous region in the state of Guerrero. Many are the daughters, granddaughters or nieces of traditional midwives. They are also the freshman class of the country’s first public midwifery school…