Midwives Agripina Caicedo and Pascualina de Mosquera attend a birth in Buenaventura, Colombia in October 2009. Joana Toro (Getty Images)
This Thursday, the constitutional court recognized midwifery work as an ancestral knowledge and cultural heritage of Colombia. Midwives are the people charged with the task of helping women give birth, a task that women used to perform based on the ancestral traditions of their community. Nowadays, becoming a midwife requires a certain degree. The Court holds that “midwifery is a manifestation of the plurality of the nation and a form of protection of the reproductive rights of women belonging to the communities where that knowledge is practiced.” This recognition obliges the Department of Health to integrate midwives into the Social Security health care system and the Congress of the Republic to legislate on this.
Guardianship was requested by midwifery organizations from Chocó and Valle del Cauca. They argue that in addition to attending births, they accompany the pregnant mother and care for the newborn, provide ancestral medicine and diagnostic services, and treat diseases in the communities to which they belong through the use of medicinal plants.
Ivonne Johanna Orejuela has been a midwife for 17 years and is part of the Bogotá Ethnic Midwifery Network. Arriving displaced by the conflict, Orejuela insists that midwifery in the capital has been an ordeal because it is not legal. “I don’t have permission to give birth at home, we do it because women are looking for us and our duty is to support them. In addition, this allows us to reconnect with our ancestral customs, but it has been very difficult to exercise this due to the economic interests that exist in motherhood.” Orejuela believes this ruling will reduce the rate of obstetric violence. “Women are much better cared for at home,” he says.
Midwives dress a newborn Joana Toro (Getty Images)
The lawyers’ organization Ilex Acción Jurídica y Asorupa, an NGO that brings together 1,600 traditional midwives who have preserved the knowledge and medicine of their ancestors for 34 years, has launched a legal battle to get the court to grant them this recognition and the same Health workers are calling for protective measures during the pandemic. The court found that the Ministry of Health “violated the plaintiff midwives’ fundamental rights by not giving them priority in the National Covid-19 vaccination plan and by excluding them from the economic recognition granted by the government”.
The letter now gives the Department of Health six months to make the economic credit payment and conduct an information campaign on the Covid vaccine. In addition, the court points to the constitutional and legal obligation to integrate midwifery as a form of ancestral medicine into the general system of social security in the health sector, and clarifies that this process must be carried out in consultation with those practicing the exercise. “Midwives are a resource for sex education and family planning in the communities they are part of,” she says.
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