Welcome to <i>Birth</i>'s Special Issue on Critical Midwifery Studies

In June 2022, the Critical Midwifery Studies (CMS) Collective published a commentary, calling for the development of Critical Midwifery Studies: a field of critical scholarship within midwifery that analyzes injustice in sexual, reproductive, maternal, and newborn care (SRMN) [1]. The CMS Collective is a growing transnational collective consisting of members from the Global South and North, including midwives, doulas, scholars, educators, service users and other advocates for justice in SRMN. Over the past three years, CMS has emerged as a field of scholarship to which authors, irrespective of their affiliation to the collective, have contributed (Einion and Robertson 2023 [2]; Melamed 2024 [3]; Thompson and Yates-Doerr 2024 [4]; Mulder et al. 2023 [5]; Isobel 2023 [6]; Ménage and Patterson 2025 [7]; Melamed et al. 2024 [8]; Sharma, Ku and Gallardo 2025 [9]; Van der Waal 2023 [10]; Van der Waal 2024 [11]; Van der Waal et al. 2024 [12]; Van der Waal et al. 2025 [13]; Mayne and Ghidei 2024 [14]; Parker et al. 2024 [15]; Overtoom, Goodarzi and Kanu 2025 [16]). In addition to academic uptake, the 2022 Utrecht summer school programme in Humanizing Birth (lectures available online) [17] and the transnational collaboration on Birth Futures have emerged from this initiative [18]. CMS was established in 2021, sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement that explicated racial injustices through the whole of society, including those that affect reproductive care and outcomes. These injustices were exacerbated further by the COVID-19 pandemic. Together we are focused on examining how midwifery can explicitly counter inequity and promote global SRMN justice. In the 2022 commentary, we underscored the vast track record of care provided by autonomous midwives globally and highlighted the potential of midwifery to abolish systematic injustice (for instance, in the forms of obstetric violence and obstetric racism) in reproductive care. We argued that the potential of midwifery as a liberatory practice aimed at reproductive justice can only be realized if midwifery critically reflects on its own position, including its own complicity in perpetuating injustice. While midwifery has long engaged with second wave feminist literature, we flagged a lack of engagement with more recent forms of critical theory, such as intersectionality, post- and decolonial theory, Black studies, queer and trans studies, dis/ability studies, the climate justice movement, and anti-war and anti-capitalist theory. One recent example of the failure of midwifery to confront social injustice is the disappointing response to the genocide waged by Israël on Palestinians. Most professional midwifery organizations declined to express their solidarity or support for our colleagues and pregnant people in Palestine who have been forced to work and give birth under conditions so violent that they have been termed “reproductive genocide” [19]. In order for midwifery to realize its liberatory potential, it must develop knowledge of fields of critical theory so that it can practice constant reflection on the intersecting politics, processes, and power axes of sexism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, heteronormativity, the gender binary, and the associated dangers of the climate breakdown, war, and other humanitarian crises as they disproportionately affect those who are marginalized by systems of oppression. Midwifery is an institutionalized and appropriated profession that can be an agent of harm, as well as a profession that suffers its own marginalization and oppression; midwives are the oppressed and the oppressor. As such, midwives have unique epistemic, normative, and experienced-based perspectives that can enable us to see and address the larger social issues that undermine maternal and neonatal wellbeing. Through liberatory autonomous praxis that explicitly centers the marginalized and the oppressed through practices of radical care and mutual aid, midwifery is able to both critically analyze institutional marginalization and oppression, and offer alternatives that can make reproductive justice for all a reality. But this can happen only if midwifery takes up critical theory as part of its practice and philosophy, and if it refuses to be complicit in the perpetuation of injustice. We, as guest editors, along with Birth's editor-in-chief Melissa Cheyney, invite you to engage in this special issue on Critical Midwifery Studies. We would like to acknowledge all the hard work and perseverance of the members of the Critical Midwifery Studies collective. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Research data are not shared.