Introduction
Midwifery activism in North America is conventionally associated with an
intensely local politics of choice regarding pregnancy and birth, and with provincial
and state health care policies regarding professional rights to practice. In this paper,
I examine midwifery activism at a different scale, through the forms of
internationalism envisioned by midwifery advocates in North America. In their
attempts to link midwives’ professional interests across national boundaries,
midwives are actively engaged in cultivating new forms of community, in part
through appeals to the “global” nature of midwifery. This paper examines the
invocations of global midwifery within activist networks in North America. In so
doing, I link work on the production of globality with the geographies of emotion,
a link articulated in part by the development of new communication technologies
that shrink the perceived distance between bodies.