In Mexico, New Mothers Are Seeking Out Old Rituals

On a recent quiet morning, Regina Llanes Granillo placed her hands on a new mother’s body.

She and another midwife began a sobada, a Mayan abdominal massage meant to help the intestines settle back into place. With warm lavender and lemon balm oil, she traced slow circles across the stomach, the ladder of the intestines, the ovaries.

Her hands paused at the bellybutton, pressing lightly, searching for what she called a “heartbeat” — a psychic pulse that she said would reveal whether the body’s energy was too high or too low.

The ritual was a tribute not only to the child born months earlier, but to the transformation of her friend, Kay Nicte Cisneros García, into a new mother: a birth within a birth.

Then she bound Ms. Cisneros with shawls and led her to a bath infused with herbs. These are the kind of midwife practices rooted in Indigenous traditions and knowledge that an increasing number of women in Mexico are turning to, experts say.

Just as more women have been seeking out midwives and doulas in the United States and Europe over the last decade, interest has risen in Mexico, including in the capital, according to researchers, health experts and midwives.

Here, women navigating the sometimes isolating experience of motherhood say the traditions offer a more personal and meaningful approach to childbirth and postpartum care than conventional health centers, clinics or hospitals usually provide.

Midwives in Mexico, or parteras, often take a critical view of conventional obstetric care, arguing that hospitals reduce childbirth and women’s health to rigid protocols and unnecessary interventions, and strip women of their autonomy.

By contrast, they said, midwifery offers an ancestral, holistic practice that centers women’s choices, emotions and circumstances.

The dominant “medical model has treated pregnancy, menstruation, menopause and other processes as diseases to be cured, or merely physical processes, when they are not,” said Ms. Cisneros, a midwife herself.

She noted that women are increasingly seeking care attentive not only to the body but “also to emotions and the spiritual dimension, recognizing childbirth and motherhood as physical, cultural, social and emotional experiences.”

Until recently, modern medicine in Mexico had largely brushed aside older midwife traditions. Some doctors say some of the practices can be dangerous if they replace professional care from an obstetrician-gynecologist, especially in complicated pregnancies.

But even skeptical health professionals acknowledge that, in remote and rural communities where clinics, hospitals and social services are scarce or nonexistent, traditional midwives remain essential frontline health workers. There are more than 15,000 of them nationwide, according to government data.

Dr. Alejandra Seligson, an OB-GYN in Mexico City, recognized the important role traditional midwives play, particularly in rural areas, but warned that their care has limits. Conditions such as pre-eclampsia, she said, require close monitoring in a hospital setting.

Screening, she added is essential. Midwifery should be limited to low-risk pregnancies to avoid putting mothers and babies at risk when dealing with complications. In cities where traffic can delay emergency transfers, home births can carry additional dangers.

“Minutes are critical,” she said. “A swift transfer to a hospital can mean the difference between the baby suffering permanent brain damage and not.”

She argued that obstetric care and traditional midwifery should coexist, as they offer complementary forms of care.

Amparo Calderón, 48, a traditional midwife of Mayan descent who lives on the outskirts of Mexico City, said that public perception, especially abroad, had long reduced traditional midwifery to images of Indigenous women delivering babies.

“In truth it carries a far broader, ancestral worldview and philosophy,” Ms. Calderón said, noting that the actual number of traditional midwives may be an undercount, since many remain unregistered with the government.

Faced with overcrowded hospitals and the fear of contagion there, many expectant mothers turned to midwives, who generally work at home or in midwife centers known as casas de partería. They sought what they said was a safer, more intimate alternative, Ms. Cisneros recalled.

Ms. Cisneros, 26, trained for four years at a center in the capital and said that midwifery offers “a more dignified, loving and respectful” approach to pregnancy, birth and motherhood than the typical clinical setting.

During Ms. Cisneros’s own session, Mrs. Llanes, 29, used cigar-shaped sticks of dried mugwort and charcoal, lit near the skin to warm certain points — a technique sometimes used in other cultures’ traditional medicine. Midwives in Mexico often also use the heat of freshly pressed tortillas or warm volcanic rocks.

Next came “el abrazo del rebozo,” or the “embrace of the shawl,” a ritual meant for “closing” a woman’s spirit and energy after the opening of childbirth.

Seven shawls were laid out, each draped and tightened around a part of Ms. Cisneros’s body: The hips were bound tightest to realign the pelvis, Mrs. Llanes explained, adding that each shawl carried its own meaning.

“The wrapping is like an embrace that centers you and holds you,” said Ms. Cisneros, who gave birth in June to her first child, a daughter named Inti. “It closes everything that was opened to give way to your baby’s life.”

The two midwives swaddled Ms. Cisneros across the chest to symbolize a self-hug, “an act of return,” said Mrs. Llanes.

Finally, layers of fabric enveloped Ms. Cisneros like a cocoon. Slowly she emerged from the folds, as though she herself were being born again — “because no woman is ever the same after giving birth,” Mrs. Llanes said.

Then came a bath infused with arnica, basil, lemon balm, calendula, rosemary and other medicinal plants — an anointing for her body and her spirit, the midwives said.

After a while, her baby daughter was slipped into the warm water with her, and they rested in a quiet embrace.

The wrapping and postpartum herbal bath are just two of the ceremonies offered by parteras across Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

In Mexico, midwives generally fall into three categories: those trained at universities and formal institutions; those considered independent, like Ms. Cisneros and Mrs. Llanes, who trained in programs run by nonprofits and casas de partería, which blend modern obstetric training with traditional practices; and traditional midwives, who draw on knowledge passed down orally, often in Indigenous languages.

Long before clinics or doctors were part of the picture, the midwives said, they were the ones guiding women through labor, sometimes saving lives with nothing but their hands and experience.

Before the rituals began, Ms. Cisneros offered a prayer, setting the intention for the day’s practices.

I invoke all this love and gratitude I feel, the knowing that I am not alone, that I do not have to be alone,” she said. “And that the support of other women is what sustains me and has kept me afloat throughout this whole process.”