Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade

By Sara Matthiesen

The landmark case Roe v. Wade redefined family: it is now commonplace for Americans to treat having children as a choice. But the historic decision also coincided with widening inequality, an ongoing trend that continues to make choice more myth than reality. In this new and timely history, Matthiesen shows how the effects of incarceration, for-profit healthcare, disease, and poverty have been worsened by state neglect, forcing most to work harder to maintain a family.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520970441

Sara Matthiesen

Sara Matthiesen is a historian of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in the United States. She is Assistant Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University.

Book preview

Reproduction Reconceived

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Barbara S. Isgur Endowment Fund in Public Affairs.

REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: A NEW VISION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Edited by Rickie Solinger, Khiara M. Bridges, Zakiya Luna, and Ruby Tapia

1. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, by Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger

2. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, by Laura Briggs

3. Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health, by Chris A. Barcelos

4. Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics, by Krystale E. Littlejohn

5. Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade, by Sara Matthiesen

Reproduction Reconceived

FAMILY MAKING AND THE LIMITS OF CHOICE AFTER ROE V. WADE

Sara Matthiesen

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Sara Matthiesen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Matthiesen, Sara, 1985– author.

Title: Reproduction reconceived : family making and the limits of choice after Roe v. Wade / Sara Matthiesen.

Other titles: Reproductive justice ; 5.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Series: Reproductive justice: a new vision for the twenty-first century; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021025580 (print) | LCCN 2021025581 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520298200 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520298217 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520970441 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families—United States—History—20th century. | Families—United States—History—21st century. | Reproductive rights—United States. | BISAC: MEDICAL / Public Health

Classification: LCC HQ535 .M384 2021 (print) | LCC HQ535 (ebook) | DDC 306.850973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025580

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025581

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

Introduction

1. The Labor of Illegibility: Lesbian and Single Motherhood According to the Law

2. The Labor of Captivity: Incarcerated Mothers and Their Children

3. The Labor of Survival: Racism, Poverty, and the Uses of Infant Mortality Rates

4. The Labor of Risk: Or, How to Have a Family in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

5. The Labor of Choice: Navigating the Abortion Debate and Lifelines of Last Resort

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

In August 2018, the New York Times published an article about college-educated mothers’ stalled re-entry into the United States labor force.¹ The piece featured the research of four economists, who sought to explain why women in the United States continued to outpace men in terms of education when they did not seem to be putting that education to use in the labor market. Women’s participation in the workforce hit a wall in 1990—after a rapid increase between 1960 and 1980, it had largely plateaued. The team of scholars—Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, and Ebonya Washington—offered a multi-part answer to this puzzle.² The first part was largely structural: the costs of motherhood began increasing in the 1990s. Child care had become more expensive since the 1980s, breastfeeding was strongly encouraged over formula, creating an exorbitant time cost, and the rise of what sociologist Sharon Hays called intensive parenting in the 1990s meant more money and time going towards children’s extracurricular activities starting at a very young age.³ The second part was more psychological: women born in the 1960s through the 1970s, the cohort the economists based their findings on, seriously underestimated the employment costs of motherhood—the time, effort or money necessary to raise their children while also working. Despite having invested greatly in their professional development and stating that they had every intention of continuing their careers after giving birth, the study found that these same women were more likely to be at home with the kids after motherhood had proved far more costly than they anticipated.⁴

Nearly forty years ago, feminist poet Adrienne Rich cautioned that using middle-class women’s white-collar employment as a measure of progress was bound to result in a misdiagnosis of the work that remained. Commenting on the 1980s trope of the white, professional mother whose ability to have it all supposedly made feminism obsolete, Rich wrote, "The working mother with briefcase was, herself, a cosmetic touch on a society deeply resistant to fundamental changes. The ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres were still in disjunction. She had not found herself entering an evolving new society, a society in transformation. She had only been integrated into the same structures which had made liberation movements necessary." ⁵ Capitalism was willing to accommodate these new workers, so long as they did not let their other job—mothering—get in the way of their paid work. Furthermore, declining wages, the shift towards a service economy, and long-standing racial and gender hierarchies that stratified the labor market ensured that beginning in the 1970s mothers who went to work without briefcases would become a growing share of the nation’s poor and working class, concentrated in jobs that comprise the feminized, racialized, and ever expanding care economy. ⁶ Rich understood what the economists seemed to have missed: to measure motherhood solely as a drain on one’s labor supply and potential earnings took for granted the devaluation of care integral to a society deeply resistant to fundamental changes. What Rich could not have predicted in 1986 was just how rapaciously these same structures would wrest accommodation—in terms of time, earnings, and general way of life—from the vast majority of workers in the United States. What the Occupy movement asserted in 2011 with the slogan We are the 99% has only become steadily more visible and applicable: the concentration of income and wealth among the top 1 percent of earners in the United States has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. Income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s, producing a labor market characterized by poverty wages, precarious categories of supposed non-workers such as the independent contractor, a culture of overwork, and wage growth experienced almost exclusively by the top earners. Following the recovery from the Great Recession, the top 1 percent captured 91 percent of the income gains between 2009 and 2012, and by 2014 71 percent of American workers earned less than 50,000 dollars a year.⁷ As the vast majority of Americans were squeezed, they had to figure out how to take care of their families with less time, less earnings, and less security. While the study featured in the New York Times measured the rising costs of motherhood in time spent on childrearing, breastfeeding trends, and child care expenses, recent estimates based on data from the Current Expenditures Survey put the price tag of childrearing at 12,980 dollars annually per child—an unfathomable cost if, like 38 percent of American workers did in 2014, one earns less than 20,000 dollars a year.⁸ It was not just that the college-educated mothers in the study had underestimated the demands of parenting, or even that the aspects of motherhood tracked by economists had become more costly. It was that by the twenty-first century, capitalism placed serious limits on most Americans’ horizons and required them to resolve on their own whatever aspects of life exceeded those limits.

And all of this is to say almost nothing of the unpaid job women had taken on when they failed to make good on their career plans. When economists concluded that current cohorts of women indeed overestimate their future labor supply, they reproduced the logic of a system that makes reproductive labor invisible, thereby justifying its devaluation even when it is waged.⁹ Despite the fact that women repeatedly told researchers how parenting was harder than they had anticipated—evidence of how motherhood itself requires a labor supply—the study emphasized the cost parenting posed to potential but, ultimately, lost profits. In this way, the study took for granted the disjuncture between the public and private spheres Rich had hoped might be transformed in a society organized around the equal distribution of necessary resources, leisure, and life chances. In contrast to the study’s conclusion that family making imperiled women’s real work, visible as such due to the wage it garnered, socialist feminists have suggested we can think of time caring for others as uncompensated labor that powers the economy through its reproduction of current and future workers. Feminist scholarship has also noted, just as the precarious, low-wage jobs of mothers who work in the fastest growing sector of the labor market providing care make clear, that caring for others is as real a labor market as any other. These interrelated realities—the insistence that family making is not work and the extreme exploitation of care work that is paid—are partially responsible for the inequality that has accumulated over the last forty years.¹⁰ Which raises an important question: if the aforementioned discussion paints a picture of ever worsening working conditions for labor that is paid, what would we find if we looked at the other job working mothers have been doing for the past forty years through a similar lens? What worsening conditions as they relate to family making might we need to account for in order to further explain the untenable inequality that has come to define life in the United States?

Reproduction Reconceived answers these questions by examining the history of family making on the margins. The following pages offer an appraisal made possible by an alternative value system, one that does not devalue the reproduction and care of humans—that sees care work not as a drain on capital but as a boon to it. What I call family making—the practices, costs, and labors of creating and maintaining parent-child relations—is an investment of labor, time, and money that produces and sustains not products, but people who, in turn, create yet more, varied intimacies that make life worth living while also making society itself possible.¹¹ When it comes to the vaunted realm of the nuclear family, the United States is deeply invested in the idea that the care of one’s own children should be, at best, a labor of love, at worst, a private burden resolved via the market, but should never be accorded the status of invaluable work that contributes to the public good. As I argue in the following chapters, this inaccurate assessment of family has produced immense, varied, and often incalculable costs. But in order to fully reckon with the costs that have accumulated, it is first necessary to understand the conditions that produced them. Neither family making nor our current ideas about it are unchanging. Over the past forty years, the labors that comprise family making have been forced to multiply as a result of deepening inequality, while the idea that having a family is an economic privilege has hardened. Reproduction Reconceived is a history of these changes and their costs. It is an appraisal of how family making became harder, what costs piled up as a result of such unequal circumstances, and which families have borne the greatest share of them.

ORIGIN STORIES

When it comes to the recent history of reproductive politics in the United States, arguably nothing looms larger than the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion in 1973 and the subsequent legacy of Roe v. Wade. Over the past seven years, I have described this book to most people with the same one-liner: It is about reproductive politics in the U.S. since the 1970s. Without fail, my audience assumed reproductive politics meant the right to abortion, and proceeded with a comment or question about the current state of the abortion debate. Despite the growing visibility of the reproductive justice movement, not to mention numerous histories evidencing the expansiveness of reproduction, reproductive politics continues to conjure abortion in the minds of many.¹²

No doubt one of the reasons for this narrowed focus is the longevity, volatility, and visibility of the abortion debate in the United States. The popular understanding of Roe—as a contest between those who believe abortion represents a fundamental right to bodily autonomy and those who see it as the disavowal of the sanctity of human life—is a cleaner version than history would ever allow.¹³ Nonetheless, this narrow understanding of Roe, and the seemingly intractable nature of the struggle over its future, captures the significance of the decision for those who consider themselves to be involved in this fight and for the many, many more who observe from the sidelines. Specifically, the phrase reproductive politics raises the specter of the entrenched terms that define the debate over abortion, where a woman’s right to choose collides, often violently, with the unborn’s right to live.

But before this view of abortion rigidified into a defense of the quintessential reproductive right on the one hand and the quintessential threat to life on the other, it was sanctioned by a legal decision, Roe, that had a specific effect: pregnancy became a choice for motherhood rather than a precondition of motherhood.¹⁴ This statement is not as obvious as it might seem. The dominant framing of the abortion debate, courtesy of the decades-long campaigns waged by the pro-choice and pro-life movements, captures only half of the issue: is the choice to end a pregnancy a fundamental right of bodily autonomy or a fundamental affront to human life? The other possible outcome of that choice, choosing motherhood, is left dangling, somehow at a distance from choice’s legally sanctioned arrival. This gap demands our attention, an investigation of what the post-Roe world has meant for those whose so-called choice is not the one the abortion debate pivots around. What happened to ideas about motherhood when Roe made it a legal choice? How does this redefinition of motherhood square with what families have faced in the post-Roe decades? And why is the ability to have an abortion immediately recognizable, while the ability to have a family—much less family as a right that one is entitled to—so much harder to envision?

To answer these questions, we need to consider the 1973 decision alongside a number of related developments. With the help of other changes that collectively untethered sex from procreation and, more importantly, marriage, Roe inaugurated a new understanding of pregnancy. In fact, in many ways, Roe is best thought of as the end of the so-called sexual revolution. Americans’ views on abortion were already becoming more liberal before the 1973 decision, a shift made possible in part by the increasing tolerance for contraception and premarital sex that took place over the course of the 1960s. The legalization of contraception in 1965 set in motion an evolving definition of privacy that would also underpin Roe, and by 1967 contraception was being sold over the counter regardless of a customer’s marital status. These changes initiated a new way of thinking about having children as many Americans came to treat having a family as a question—a choice to be made.¹⁵ A series of Supreme Court cases that declared distinctions between marital and nonmarital children as unconstitutional delivered another blow to marriage’s authority. In a very short period of time, norms structuring marriage, gender, and sex were upended. Both legal changes and individual practices helped make previously taboo topics like premarital sex, co-habitation before marriage, and single motherhood more common and openly discussed topics than had been the case just a decade prior. The political stakes of these changes were also made clear by different feminist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Contraception and abortion to control one’s reproductive life, to allow sex for pleasure, and to turn marriage and motherhood into options rather than mandates—these were some of the changes that would need to take place if women were going to gain more autonomy in society.¹⁶

But only the right to abortion had the power to untether pregnancy from motherhood, to make whether or not to remain pregnant a choice, to decide what one’s own body would and would not do—even after it had started down a course of doing. This reality explains why feminists from a variety of movements considered the right to abortion so fundamental to liberation struggles, even if they disagreed about the societal conditions required to ensure abortion was freely chosen.¹⁷ The legalization of abortion made pregnancy an unstable condition in a way that the possibility of miscarriages could not. After Roe, the pregnant individual was the major factor upon which a pregnancy hinged. And, as pregnancy became a choice, so too did motherhood.

Choice in 1973, however, was as limited as it was liberating. Importantly, Roe delivered legal choice after the nation had already made some key decisions about just how much the family should be reorganized to accommodate changing norms around gender roles, sex, and marriage. Two years prior to Roe, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bill, despite its bipartisan support, that would have delivered universal child care. Federal government also failed to meet the demands of different feminist movements responsible for popularizing the idea that child-rearing was a job in and of itself, one for which mothers should be compensated, as the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) argued in its efforts to bring dignity and a living wage to poor, Black mothers demonized and neglected by welfare.¹⁸ These and other decisions had material impacts on the feasibility of family making for millions of Americans. But they also signaled the start of a broad-scale shift in political winds that one historian has described as the moment when liberalism came to seem to many millions of ordinary Americans more like a moral threat than an economic helping hand. ¹⁹ Wide swaths of the population were fast losing faith in the tenet that government should play a role, however limited such a role had been throughout the nation’s history, in mitigating racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Debates over feminism, sexuality, and the family—alongside those over civil rights, urban rebellions, and law and order—remade the nation in the final decades of the twentieth century. As conservatism moved from the right to the center of American politics, ultimately bringing Democrats along, the liberal welfare state came under ideological and material attack.²⁰ This is part of the backdrop against which motherhood took on its post-Roe features.²¹

When children became a choice women knowingly and actively made, this meant that the circumstances which shaped family making since the 1970s, no matter how dire, also became women’s responsibility to overcome. It matters that motherhood became a choice just as more and more families confronted what one historian has called the Age of Inequality.²² For many Americans, economic circumstances stressed rather than supported the costs and labors of caring for children. Struggling families in the 1970s confronted stagnant wages, inflation, and job loss especially in manufacturing, an industry whose owners sought relocation to escape union power.²³ These realities pushed ever greater numbers of married women into the labor market to secure a second income to compensate for the family’s primary wage earner’s deflated or lost wages.²⁴ The vast majority of such women encountered a dramatically altered labor market defined by precarious, low-wage, service jobs that would come to define the new postindustrial order.²⁵ These married women joined single women, many of them also mothers, who had long labored outside the home but had largely done so in the only employment available to them in a market stratified by race and gender: domestic and pink collar work that was poorly paid. Despite this dramatic influx of married women into the labor market, working Americans wound up poorer than when the decade began.²⁶

The realities of a market increasingly comprised of low-wage, service jobs and the unresolved labor problem of child care fell heaviest on single mothers, as evidenced by their continued participation in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) during this period. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, these families increasingly turned to the social welfare program in order to make ends meet despite rampant racial and gender discrimination, inadequate payments, and burdensome work requirements.²⁷ Whether they looked to the wage economy or the welfare state to make ends meet, single mothers confronted an ideological system that stubbornly refused to recede despite the unfolding economic reality. This ideological system dictated that fathers, not mothers, were the primary breadwinners and that the work women did caring for their families was not work at all. As a result of the worsening economic conditions, the feminization of poverty that would mobilize some feminist groups by the early 1980s was already in full swing by the time motherhood became a choice—by 1977 nearly half of all poor families were headed by a single mother, a number that had doubled since 1950.²⁸ So, what did the immediate post-Roe world look like for families?

Writing about the future of the reproductive rights movement in 1981, scholar and activist Angela Davis went so far as to describe the conditions in which poor, women of color found themselves and their families as so miserable they could cause women to relinquish the right to reproduction itself. Here, Davis issued a warning to the majority-white abortion rights movement that reproductive choice could easily slide into reproductive coercion if women felt their impoverished circumstances made it impossible to imagine raising another child that they otherwise wanted. To the movement’s argument that abortion provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty, Davis issued the corrective, as if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc., etc.²⁹ Davis understood that capitalism and racism would accommodate Roe, producing a terrain where the liberatory elements of reproductive choice were hamstrung by the persistence of exploitative conditions. This was the terrain that confronted families following the legalization of abortion, and one that would become only more treacherous as both inequality and the idea that child-rearing was best left to the private family increased over the ensuing decades. Having children had become a choice at the precise moment more and more families were struggling and also were expected to meet the costs of family making on their own.

Family values, or the politics of sanctifying the heteropatriarchal home, became the ground upon which conservative power was consolidated. But these ostensibly cultural politics consistently carried policy riders: fiscal austerity measures that decimated social supports. This devastating and effective political framework helped transform those reliant on government support (rather than on their own economically well-functioning nuclear families) into bad actors who got what they deserved—very little to nothing at all.³⁰ Gender and sexual politics during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s helped remake the welfare state and the breadwinner wage, ultimately turning both into artifacts of a bygone era.³¹ It did not matter that the viability of an economy structured around a male provider had never been universally accessible and had largely disappeared before the close of the 1970s—for different reasons, both liberals and conservatives refused to face facts with regard to this economic reality.³² The unforgiving harshness of a politics hellbent on responding to mounting inequality with little more than the mantra of personal responsibility is typically illustrated by two prominent plot points when it comes to debates about family making: President Bill Clinton making good on his promise to end welfare as we know it and the unfinished business of precisely how mothers are supposed to balance work in the home with work in the wage economy.³³ Scholars and journalists have focused on these two sites for good reason. Both illustrate the privatization of dependency that defined the political visions of the vast majority of politicians, regardless of party, by the end of the twentieth century. Both make clear that the costs and labors of family making would not only be borne by individual families but would also be subordinated to the almost universal adult role of breadwinner that mothers, whether by choice or coercion, were taking on.³⁴ One scholar recently described the conditions we have inherited from such policy decisions: universal free childcare remains a dream, paid family leave is just now moving seriously onto politicians’ agendas, and workfare has replaced welfare rights activists’ demands for income supports for caregiving. ³⁵ Collectively, these policy decisions and the problems they failed to resolve have helped make work, daycare, and welfare the plot points around which debates regarding the euphemistically phrased work-life balance continue to revolve.

There is no doubt that these plot points—which most immediately index the problem of needing both a steady cash flow and a steady labor source in order to ensure children are taken care of—remain key to the story of family making since the 1970s. But as anyone who has participated in the work of family making knows intimately, they are far from the only forces that keep true reproductive freedom out of reach. This book argues that having a family has become harder and costlier since the 1970s —especially for those who built families on the economic, racial, and sexual margins of society—due to proliferating and often interconnected factors that are less often associated with family, reproduction, or work-life balance. Specifically, disease, increased criminalization and mass incarceration; medical and legal gatekeeping of the means required for queer people to make and be recognized as a family; a racist, for-profit system of healthcare; and the unprecedented reliance on charitable, faith-based organizations to deliver social welfare services have all wreaked havoc on families. As a result, the reproductive labor of family making has increasingly extended far beyond merely how to juggle child care in between work shifts and how to pay for food and rent. As this book shows, these basic but crucial necessities were only the tip of the iceberg for women diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, incarcerated in prisons, who dared to raise fatherless children in lesbian households, or feared their newborn would not live to see their first birthday due to their own lifetimes of medical neglect. The exclusive focus on home, work, and welfare greatly underestimates the barriers to family making erected as a result of broader political and economic shifts that have shaped American life since the late 1970s. In order to capture the full extent of the labors and costs these barriers have placed on families, Reproduction Reconceived broadens the scope of what counts as the labor of family making, where it gets performed, and how the state has refused to share in this necessary work.³⁶ Importantly, state refusal not only ensured that choice would be a fiction for most. It also necessarily produced new forms of reproductive labor through its own negligence. At the broadest register, Reproduction Reconceived is a labor history of the work involved in choosing family during a period where meaningful choice for many families was nowhere to be found.

FOREGROUNDING STATE NEGLECT IN REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS

Some caveats are in order. Since the late 1970s, life in the United States has been steadily approaching our current reality, one in which every family and household has the private responsibility to figure out how to support dependents and enable them to survive and thrive, even as they do so on an uneven playing field constructed by both business and government. ³⁷ Yet it is necessary to acknowledge that this is not a wholesale departure from government’s relationship to family making prior to the 1970s. The social movements that captured political life in the 1960s and 1970s were, after all, demanding a radical transformation of both liberal society and the inequality that appeared to them integral to—rather than a grand departure from—the foundational premises of the United States.³⁸ American liberalism, even during its most active periods of social welfare, has largely refused to subsidize the labors and costs of family making. It is not hyperbole to say that the moments when the state did expand its safety net, it invested heavily in the white, patriarchal, nuclear family, reinforcing it as both the proper site for social reproduction and the deserving recipient of some forms of social insurance.³⁹

This is perhaps best illustrated by programs designed to catch those whose family making fell outside of the nuclear norm, though only on very narrow terms. State-level mothers’ pensions meant to aid widows that inspired the federal program Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), made possible by the New Deal, were always conceived as a supplemental rather than a primary wage so as not to undermine dominant gender roles that defined husbands as productive, financial providers and wives as dependent, reproductive caretakers. Even when entitlements such as Social Security were not being funneled directly to the male breadwinner, policymakers had his supremacy in mind. Gender supremacy went hand in hand with racial supremacy, and race-based exclusions, baked directly into federal and state legislation and enforced via administrators of aid, ensured that one’s deservingness to receive even the supplementary (read: insufficient) wage of welfare was tied to whiteness and sexual morality.⁴⁰ Throughout the twentieth century, this helped keep white, native-born women’s motherhood legitimate even when a male provider was absent while denigrating its necessary counterpart—nonwhite, especially Black, women’s motherhood—all the while ensuring that family making’s value only officially came into view as a wage-less labor of love.

At the same time, it is undeniable that a central feature of the post-Roe period was the twentieth-century liberal welfare state’s immense diminishment—a change that had significant material and ideological consequences for Americans’ access to the public good. Scholars have demonstrated how a conservative campaign organized around the heteropatriarchal, nuclear family was part and parcel of the economic agenda of neoliberalism: deregulation, slashed domestic budgets, and the superiority of the market to deliver ever dwindling public goods.⁴¹ While these policy changes create systematic insecurity for working people, neoliberalism as a form of governance encourages individuals to see their conditions as individually determined (rather than structurally produced).⁴² When it comes to family making under neoliberalism, the very policy decisions that make this already labor- and resource-intensive endeavor more costly morph into bad choices for which struggling families have only themselves to blame. And it is those families who do not conform to the white, nuclear, private household that are encouraged to self-flagellate via public demonization and punitive policies, a shame tax levied most heavily upon poor, single, nonwhite mothers.⁴³

Feminist scholarship on the history of reproduction in the United States has shown that the neoliberal regime is only the most recent node in a long history of punishing family making on the margins in order to shore up the idealized norm (itself rife with punitive mechanisms designed to control white, middle-class women’s reproduction). From the reproductive and sexual exploitation of enslaved women, to eugenics campaigns targeting indigent and incarcerated women, to the forced sterilization of poor Black, Latina, and Native American women reliant on public health services, to the criminalization of abortion, the history of reproductive rights in the United States is littered with concerted efforts to control different women’s reproduction for various ends.⁴⁴ Feminist anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists have demonstrated that the mobilization of reproduction to achieve these varied ends is far from past but remains an ongoing project.⁴⁵ Collectively, these works illuminate the many ways different women’s reproduction is disciplined through various regulatory frameworks, often in service of broader political aims. Everything from anti-immigrant sentiment to fears about overpopulation to gains for women in the workplace to economic policy intent on state austerity can find expression in punitive campaigns that fall on women’s bodies in stratified ways.⁴⁶

Because neoliberalism has become so ubiquitous a label that it is now an open question whether or not it still has explicative value, and since harm can be—and, more often than not, is—doled out slowly and subtly, the history that follows is not described in terms of neoliberalism, and it explores the ways family making has been imperiled by neglect just as often as it has been the target of explicit attacks.⁴⁷ Reproduction Reconceived focuses on the exploitative and miserable conditions that Angela Davis drew our attention to forty years ago in her Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights, and takes stock of what labors and costs pile up when survival in the face of exploitation and neglect overwhelms one’s experience of family making.⁴⁸

When it comes to family making in the United States since the 1970s, what the state has not done is as important as what it has done. In order to emphasize the state’s failure to act, I gather under the term state neglect historically specific conditions that especially shaped the final decades of the twentieth century, such as mass incarceration and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Neglect conveys a failure to care just as it implies a responsibility or obligation. Sometimes this failure is deliberate and willful, and sometimes it stems from indifference. Regardless, neglect means someone else has to pick up the slack. The end result is not only the punishment inherent to neglect, but the additional labor the neglected must do to survive. Just as it is expensive to be poor, it takes more work to survive in the face of neglect. In the instances examined here, this reality meant an expansion of the reproductive labor required for family making, a work burden borne overwhelmingly by women. Neglect can also tell us a lot about what we truly value (if we are able, we usually tend to the things we care about), so we can also think of neglect as one of the primary engines of the devaluation of reproductive labor. Indeed, state neglect is a precondition for the fairly common view that having and raising children is a privilege rather than a right. The state’s lack of investment ensures family is seen as a private burden and that those who fail to meet the demands of this endeavor have only themselves to blame.

We tend to overlook neglect because it is often slow and cumulative, comprised of miserable conditions that become the everyday ground on which the work of survival must be performed, and which tend to be overshadowed by more explicit, targeted reproductive rights violations. The shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth, for example, rightfully horrifies many, but the tendency for this dehumanization to pierce far more hearts than the fact that such women are very likely to lose custody of their children by virtue of being incarcerated is what this book wants to trouble. As this book shows, state neglect of family making has often had a broader reach than the regulatory campaigns that explicitly expose the violence of the state.⁴⁹ I hope that this book evidences the immensely punishing strategy of neglect as a deadly force to be mobilized against with the same urgency as overt, targeted acts of violence. Lastly, and without reducing the politics of the family to flotsam and jetsam floating above the real story of monumental wealth distribution, this history illustrates that sometimes the state simply does not care about the gendered and racialized labor of family making.⁵⁰

The fact that state neglect has served as a driving force in maintaining reproductive inequities since the 1970s demands investigation and attention. In the chapters that follow, I examine how punishment has been doled out through neglect daily, slowly, and in the face of crisis conditions rendered mundane by the state’s lack of urgency. In this book, I frame the state’s decision to neglect families at the racial, sexual, and economic margins of society as a battle over who should perform the labor of family making and what we value—questions integral to the project of reproductive freedom. Since the 1990s, the reproductive justice movement has made tremendous headway in helping the public see that the conditions in which children are raised are not a matter of private or individual choice but of structurally determined public constraints.⁵¹ The movement for reproductive justice has forcefully declared that this reality should be considered an affront to human rights.⁵² While Reproduction Reconceived is not a history of the reproductive justice movement, it is in part inspired by the liberatory, Black feminist political framework now commonly referred to as RJ, conceived of by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice in 1994.⁵³ It highlights past efforts of individuals who also understood that families were struggling against conditions not of their own making, and who believed combatting state neglect was necessary to ensure women and their children were entitled to healthier, safer, dignified lives.

SEEING STATE NEGLECT

How does one make state inaction visible? This is the methodological question at the center of Reproduction Reconceived. The following history is my answer, though it is surely not the only one. It is influenced by certain priorities. I wanted to better understand why explicit, punitive attacks on reproductive rights cause shock and outrage while the slow but potentially deadly devastation of neglect is often tolerated with seeming ease. One way to do that is to examine the experiences and efforts of people unwilling to tolerate such deadly conditions, to excavate their varying diagnoses of and responses to the state’s abdication of the rights, intimate ties, and lives of so many families. Neglect engendered conflict, action, and alternative ways of valuing family making. The following narrative is largely driven by different communities’ rejection of the idea that families had only themselves to blame for their circumstances and instead believed that local councilmembers, state officials, judges, physicians, federal authorities, and business interests were responsible for families’ conditions. They took action to hold these actors accountable and to demand more, and in the process they crafted