When Navajo Midwife Nicolle Gonzales talks with Native American women about birth, there’s a sense something is missing, she said in this week’s Friday Podcast. “But,” she said, “we don’t know what it is.” Gonzales grew up and remains on a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. She became a midwife and founded the Changing Woman Initiative (CWI) to address unmet maternal health care needs in her community. She is of the Tl’aashchi’I, Red Bottom clan, born for Tachii’nii, Red Running into the Water clan, Hashk’aa hadzohi, Yucca fruit-strung-out-in-a line clan, and Naasht’ezhi dine’e, Zuni clan.

“The very first political order in any society is the sexual political order established between men and women,” says Valerie M. Hudson, a University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M, in today’s Friday Podcast, recorded at a recent Wilson Center launch of the book, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide. Co-authored by Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, Professor Emerita at Brigham Young University, and P. Lynne Nielson, a statistics professor at Brigham Young University, the book investigates how the relationship between men and women shapes the wider political order. “We argue, along with many other scholars, that the character of that first order molds the society, its governance, and its behavior,” says Hudson.

“After a period of populist nationalism…multilateralism is back, and climate is the multilateral challenge of the moment,” said David Lammy, a member of Parliament for Tottenham in the United Kingdom and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, in a recent 21^st Century Diplomacy event, co-hosted by the Wilson Center and adelphi. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is not a “reset,” but rather a catalytic moment for the international community precisely because of the pandemic and consequences for the global economy, he said. When you look at who has been left behind in countries like the United States and United Kingdom, and globally, who is at risk climate impacts, it is “black and brown people suffering all over the planet, and that is a call to arms,” said Lammy.

Camille Harris, Registered Māori Midwife, is unapologetic about her decision to study midwifery and practice exclusively with Māori families, in this week’s Friday Podcast. “It was always to serve my people,” she said. Both Harris and her professional partner, Registered Māori Midwife, Waimaire Onekawa, started their midwifery careers later in life with a clear dedication to Māori women in New Zealand. “And we just want to be able to give women—Māori women—and whanau [family], the love and care that we would hope to receive if we were the people being the recipients,” said Onekawa.

In a year that has presented enormous challenges, it is even more gratifying to present evidence that strengthens the importance of midwives as providers of essential sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services and the impact they can have on maternal and neonatal mortality and stillbirths, said Anneka Knutsson, Chief of the SRH Branch at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) at a recent Wilson Center event, in partnership with UNFPA and Johnson & Johnson, to launch the Impact of Midwives study conducted by UNFPA, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), and the World Health Organization (WHO) and published in The Lancet Global Health.

If there’s anything about responding to an epidemic, it’s that speed matters, and so does investing in people closest to the problem, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, Assistant Professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and CEO of Last Mile Health, in this week’s Friday Podcast. The latter, he said, is the root of resilience.