The “Dignity of Motherhood” Demands Something Different
The “Dignity of Motherhood” Demands Something Different
A Catholic Experiment in Reproductive Care in New Mexico
This chapter considers the work of the Catholic Medical Mission Sisters as midwives in New Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century. The sisters’ experimental initiative to provide midwifery and home birthing services to local women was integral to anti-poverty work in the state, and conformed to a midcentury Catholic view in which economic justice, understood solely in the context of the money economy, failed to address the unique dignity of women tied to the vocation of motherhood. The sisters’ work sheds light on how Catholic ideas about femaleness informed non-economic initiatives aimed at the poor, even as it also reveals the layered effects of historical experiments, economic or otherwise, to honor the “dignity of the poor,” when those experiments happened across differences of race, and in the shadow of asymmetrical relations of political power.
Keywords: anti-poverty, Catholic, economic justice, gender, home birthing, midwifery, motherhood, race, women
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