Global midwifery summit excludes Global South experts despite maternal mortality crisis
Original framing: “Midwives on frontline of childbirth deaths crisis denied visas for key summit” — The Guardian - World
The current visa regime and exclusion of Global South midwives mirrors colonial-era medical hierarchies, where Western 'experts' dictated health policies in colonized regions without local input. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s-90s dismantled public health systems in Africa and Asia, creating the very conditions that now frame midwives as 'inadequate' rather than as survivors of systemic neglect. The ICM congress in Lisbon continues this legacy by centering Western institutions in policy formation.
The exclusion of African and Asian midwives from the ICM congress in Lisbon is not an isolated bureaucratic failure but a symptom of deeper structural violence embedded in global health governance.
Colonial legacies, structural adjustment policies, and neoliberal mobility regimes have systematically devalued indigenous knowledge systems while privileging Western biomedical models, even when the latter fail to address maternal mortality. The midwives barred from the summit are not just experts but custodians of holistic, community-based care systems that have sustained populations for centuries—systems that Western models have only recently begun to acknowledge. Hermes, the trickster god of thresholds, would laugh at the absurdity of a 'global' conference that excludes the very voices it claims to empower. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in a radical reimagining of global health governance, where indigenous midwives lead policy, structural adjustment policies are reversed, and mobility regimes are democratized. This is not just about visas; it is about dismantling the epistemic hierarchies that have long dictated whose knowledge matters in the fight to save mothers and babies.