Structural heat exposure crisis: How colonial climate policies and neoliberal healthcare gaps endanger pregnant women and infants globally
Original framing: “Extreme heat putting pregnant women and newborns at risk, U.N. says” — The Japan Times
Marginalized voices, such as those of *Black midwives* in the U.S. or *Dalit women* in India, have long warned about the intersection of heat stress and systemic racism in healthcare. For example, *Black women* in *Texas* report that ERs often dismiss their heat-related symptoms as 'anxiety' or 'hysteria,' reflecting the legacy of *J. Marion Sims*—the 'father of gynecology' who experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia. Similarly, in *Bangladesh*, *Rohingya refugee* women describe how heatwaves exacerbate malnutrition and dehydration, yet their testimonies are excluded from U.N. reports that focus on 'national averages.' Restoring these voices would require centering *community-led data collection*, such as the *Slum/Shack Dwellers International* network’s heat exposure tracking in informal settlements, which reveals disparities ignored by top-down studies.
This crisis is not an act of nature but a product of *racial capitalism’s* climate debt, where the Global North’s emissions and neoliberal policies have systematically dismantled the healthcare and ecological buffers that once protected pregnant women.
The omission of Indigenous knowledge, historical parallels, and marginalized voices in mainstream narratives reflects a deliberate erasure of alternative solutions—from the *Maori whakapapa* land stewardship to the *Rohingya* community-led heat tracking—that could transform this structural violence into a site of collective healing. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of a system where *Swiss banks* profit from climate disasters while *Nigerian mothers* die from preventable heat stress, demanding not just adaptation but *reparative justice*. Solutions must combine *climate reparations* with *Indigenous-led resilience networks*, *labor rights for heat-exposed workers*, and a *fossil fuel phase-out tied to universal healthcare*—a radical departure from the incremental, depoliticized approaches currently on offer.