Journeying from November 2025’s International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Bogotá to the UN climate negotiations in Belém the following month revealed a fundamental tension. Evidence increasingly shows that climate justice requires reproductive justice, yet translating that recognition into policy commitments continues to raise political apprehensions among stakeholders.

From Kenya to Morocco to Madagascar, waves of protest have erupted across Africa. Africans—and especially young Africans—have grown increasingly frustrated with a lack of economic opportunities.

So, it is no surprise that when Afrobarometer, a pan-African, non-partisan survey research organization, asked people across 39 African countries which issues they think their governments should prioritize, people ranked unemployment as the top policy priority.

Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.

Each day, almost 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. A maternal death occurs every two minutes. Maternal mortality is defined as the death of a woman from complications of pregnancy or childbirth that occur during the pregnancy or within 6 weeks after the pregnancy ends.*

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through travel, communication, and information, interdisciplinary approaches to address global and reproductive health issues are crucial. And as the politics of reproductive healthcare are shifting in uneven ways across the globe, the need for deep understanding of local contexts within a globalized world is ever more vital. Our recently published, co-edited Wiley Blackwell handbook, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology provides a sweeping overview of studies of reproduction from an anthropologically informed lens with a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of medical anthropology, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), global and public health, and critical analyses of both gender and sexuality and of  race and ethnicity.

Midwives play a central role in maternal and newborn health. So, it is fitting that their efforts took the spotlight at a two-day event – The 5^th Global Midwifery Symposium – held during the first ever International Maternal and Newborn Health Conference (IMNHC) in May 2023 in Cape Town, South Africa.