Abstract

The United Nations Population Fund publications in 2011 and 2014, The State of the World’s Midwifery, both argue that midwives in poor countries need to be professionalized for the good of their countries and of women and children worldwide. These narratives of professionalization as the road to stability, health, respect, and women’s welfare are tangled within broader narratives of neoliberalism. These broader narratives borrow familiar commonplaces from the feminist health movement and colonial reasoning to limit global midwifery’s scope to a neoliberal system of value within a neocolonial development agenda. Using definition as a grounding commonplace to argue for the professionalization of midwives in poorer nations, these reports potentially disenfranchise many birthing people and their attendants in these nations who do not fall under the professionalized definition of midwife.