Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t get busy having more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy.
Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S. and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those “values voters.” But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike.
In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

［"Re-grasping the Birthing and 'Mothering': Capitalism and Sex/Love/Family, and the Horizon Beyond Them" as a Class of "Theories of Family" (The First Semester of the 2019 Academic Year) at School of Human Cultures, The University of Shiga Prefecture.］

［"The Present of 'Mothering': The Trend of Arguments and Practices about It" as a Class of "Comparative Analysis of the Family (S)" (The Second Semester of the 2019 Academic Year) at College of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University.］

“For Brown and Federici both, reproductive rights must be only one aspect of a broader set of demands. If the capitalist system requires the reproductive labor of those it assigns as women, then there is no capitalist-friendly way for us to reclaim bodily autonomy. Brown cites the model of “reproductive justice” as an alternative to the outdated notion of “pro-choice.””／“Liberal feminism will not win this fight for women because it is not fighting for the liberation of all women, but for maintaining individual rights granted by the status quo. Brown urges us instead to remember that feminism and anti-capitalism are inextricably linked. No more “safe, legal, and rare,” but, as the popular Redstockings slogan goes, “Free abortion, on demand.””

“ Jenny Brown discusses her new book Without Apology with Lillian Cicerchia, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Fahmida Azad and Allison Guttu.
With an anti-abortion majority in the Supreme Court and several states with only one abortion clinic, many reproductive rights activists are on the defensive. Organizer and author Jenny Brown highlights the history of legal abortion in the US up until 1873―and the century of illegal abortion that followed. Without Apology offers a spirited exploration of how the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s won abortion rights. Drawing inspiration and lessons from that radical movement, Brown illuminates the struggle for abortion rights the world over―including the successful fight to make the morning-after pill available over the counter and the recent mass movement to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban.”

“National Women’s Liberation has developed a consciousness-raising study guide to go with Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work.”