Until the mid-20th century, birth in the United States for Latinx Indigenous peoples was an ancestral ceremony guided by midwives and traditional healers.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(4):E326-332. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.326.
The social institutions of medicine and the state have a complex history of interaction in which doctors have been the originators of political ideals, goals, and social change but equally often have found themselves to be instruments of political authority.
In the past, forced sterilizations violated the autonomy of vulnerable women. Today, measures intended to protect such women from the abuses of the past may in fact hamper their autonomy in a different way.
An attempt to investigate correlations between race, attitudes, and contraceptive use did not find meaningful associations between race and attitudes about birth control or pregnancy that could influence contraceptive choice.