Birth Control and Midwifery under the Nation’s Gaze: New Mexico as a Testing Ground for Public Health and Reproductive Care

This presentation will consider reproductive healthcare and birthing practices in 1940s New Mexico. At the time, several factors across the state drew national and international attention, with particular interest in studying and using New Mexicans for case studies in birth control, healthcare, and maternal and infant health. Following the revision of the Comstock Laws in 1936, the New York Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau hoped to establish a clinic that could provide contraceptives to impoverished, Spanish-speaking women in Santa Fe. At the same time, the Santa Fe Catholic Clinic began their own initiative in 1944 to open a midwifery school to train nurse-midwives and improve the rate of infant and maternal mortality. The Santa Fe Catholic Maternity Institute Midwifery School opened that year through a partnership with the Catholic Medical Missionaries, an organization that, until that point, only opened clinics internationally, with most clinics based in India. Similar to the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau though, they, too, hoped to use New Mexico as a testing site for future projects among Spanish-speaking and other Latinx groups nationally and internationally.

These examples and others defined New Mexico as a site of imperial and colonial concern, mirroring public health efforts in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines and coalescing around concerns about reproductive care and women’s health. My paper will address these initiatives, drawing parallels between New Mexican and Latin American public health efforts while also considering how such projects impacted and shaped the lived experiences of Spanish-speaking and Mexican American communities across the state. It will address the legacies of systems of healthcare and various forms of healing (including folk healers and lay midwives); increasing emphasis on medical professionalization and access to training for nurse-midwives; and how women navigated and negotiated access to reproductive care.