City Research Online

Abstract

The pushback on women’s health rights, particularly when it comes to more vulnerable groups like indigenous women, has necessitated new approaches for targeted communication strategies by health NGOs on sexuality and reproductive health rights (SRHR). To assess indigenous women’s understanding of health communications on SRHR, the researchers conducted focus groups with the comadronas of Saving Mothers in Guatemala to explore their reception to these messages. Our results underscored the difficulties of access of these groups to quality information on reproductive health matters, placing limits on their capacity to navigate a complex (and manipulated) media landscape on SRHR. Based on our findings, the necessity to foster partnerships between NGOs, indigenous women’s groups, researchers and government to enhance health literacy skills, engaging with communities so as to co-create communications material that attends specifically to their needs is highlighted.

The authors contribute theoretically and empirically in this paper on women’s health in the global health field, particularly to a recent body of research on the way misinformation on reproductive health online (as well as within the media) is having an impact on women’s understandings of their health rights, including their capacity to consume accurate information on sexual and reproductive health (SRHR) matters. Focusing on the case of Guatemala, the researchers sheds light on the barriers that exist for indigenous women’s groups to access adequate information on reproductive health, exposing the difficulties of information flows and underlining the existence of poor communications on the topic, all which impact their access to services as well as disempowering them in their overall ‘reproductive health rights’. We thus offer an original contribution to growing research on misinformation on reproductive health, particularly work on social media and the abortion ‘infodemic’ (John et al., Citation2024; Malki et al., Citation2023; Pagoto et al., Citation2023; Selvi & Arulchelvan, Citation2024), with its focus on understanding women’s health within local contexts through a feminist and participatory lens (Matos, Citation2023). We further contribute to debates on the ‘de-colonising of global health’ by increasing the shift to local contexts to better understand health inequities and their interconnection to political, economic, social and cultural constraints, emphasizing further how communications can be a double-edged sword, potentially enabling ‘empowerment’ as well as reproducing inequalities. The research here is highly interdisciplinary and draws from the fields of health communications, sociology, development and gender studies, and public health.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	community engagement, feminist methods, reproductive health, health literacy, and misinformation
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Department of Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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