Marx, Malthus, and the Moral Economy of Reproduction

Abstract

This article examines the “backlash thesis” as a way of interpreting hostility and resistance to reproductive rights in the United States. The dominant interpretation of resistance to abortion rights or of advocacy for population control is that they are a backlash against feminism and civil rights. Granting that the backlash thesis has intuitive appeal, the article argues that it is not adequate to a contemporary analysis of these issues. It then claims that what is needed is an account of the contradictory and dynamic way in which capitalism generates anxiety about fertility and family life. The article then uses socialist feminist social reproduction theory to develop an alternative explanatory framework for why market forces form the precondition and basis for context-specific appeals to tradition rather than being antithetical to them. The latter includes both pronatalist ideas and neo-Malthusian ones about population control. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which the analysis can be useful in other contexts.

I. Rethinking the Opposition to Reproductive Rights

This article examines the “backlash thesis” as a way of interpreting hostility and opposition to reproductive rights in the United States. It is common for feminists to argue in shorthand that various forms of opposition to reproductive rights, whether those be undermining abortion rights or repressive strategies for population control, are a backlash against feminism and civil rights. Indeed, I contend that this is the dominant, mainstream interpretation insofar as it is common sense for feminists to see conservative social movements as rooted primarily in status anxiety correlated to the decline in legitimacy of traditional morality. Granting that the backlash thesis has intuitive appeal, I argue that it is not adequate for understanding the contemporary terrain of reproductive politics. It is increasingly clear that antiabortion ideologies and policies find support across a wide political spectrum (or wider than feminists have normally thought), and I argue that such developments require a different sort of analysis than the backlash thesis provides. I claim that what is needed instead is an account of the contradictory and dynamic way in which capitalism generates anxiety about fertility and family life.

What needs to be made sense of are two apparently contradictory ideological tendencies—pronatalism and neo-Malthusian “antinatalism”—and the continuing support that they find among diverse political constituencies. The trouble with the backlash thesis is its adherence to a liberal social-theoretical perspective on capitalism's “modern” character in contrast to precapitalist “traditional” cultures. From this perspective, traditionalist antifeminist and racist backlash explains resistance to the changes wrought by modern capitalist markets. Even analyses that take the problem of social class and poverty seriously as a way of explaining various forms of reproductive control do not transition successfully away from this liberal perspective, so they leave unanswered several important questions regarding the combined and uneven development of pronatalist and neo-Malthusian ideas.

I introduce socialist feminist social reproduction theory (SRT) as an alternative explanatory framework to the backlash thesis. In my analysis, SRT is a thesis within feminist political economy that explains the class character of gender oppression. In brief, capital subordinates reproductive activity to the imperatives of market competition, the results of which have a distinctly gendered character. Most important for my case is that SRT points out how labor-market dependency places distinctly capitalist and contradictory pressures on working families that garner equally contradictory reactions in society at large. I then expand upon SRT by arguing that both pronatalist and neo-Malthusian ideas should be understood in this context. Indeed, they presuppose such very modern capitalist pressures, rather than being rooted in any abstract “traditional” past.

Whereas Marx once said that “all that is solid melts into air” under the constraints of capitalist development, a better way of putting it is that “all that is old becomes new again.” Capitalism does indeed constrain reproduction in a way that forces people to adapt to it, but what is traditional does not thereby disappear; it evolves in ways that seem contradictory but that are nonetheless contiguous from a system-level perspective. Specifically, appeals to tradition both obscure and reconcile conflicting normative expectations that people have of the labor market, families, and the state. Becoming more than a simple backlash, the political logic of such appeals is distinctively modern in the sense that capitalism forms their precondition and basis rather being antithetical to them. They bolster and legitimize the family as an institution as well as appropriate deviations from it, like who can and should receive protection from the labor market by the state, or who can and should bear children. The result is a distinctly modern “moral economy” that emerges and evolves in this context, in which the ranking of working-class women is particularly low. I conclude by suggesting ways in which this analysis can be useful beyond the United States context.

II. The Backlash Thesis

The backlash thesis is a common way that feminists explain conservative social movements against reproductive rights and freedoms. It states that traditional moralists want to control women who have gotten out of control and reinstall racial hierarchies that have been eroded. Reproductive rights, particularly but not exclusively abortion rights, induce vigorous cultural and political backlash that is rooted in threats to the traditionalists’ moral worldview. There are two versions of this thesis, both of which I find inadequate for understanding contemporary reproductive politics. The first version positions traditional moralism against feminist progress. The second version positions women of color against the state and attempts by conservatives to wield the state to control fertility against civil rights. In this section, I explain why both versions had intuitive appeal in the post-1970s political terrain. They are no longer adequate, however, and they now fall short of making sense of why antiabortion campaigns continue to find support across a wide political spectrum or why population-control policies become politically viable at some historical junctures and not others. The backlash thesis is faulty because it reflects liberal assumptions about capitalist development that feminists should reconsider.

The two versions of the backlash thesis that I identify here are not, of course, mutually exclusive. It is consistent to say that a backlash is against both feminism and civil rights, albeit for different reasons and by various actors. Nonetheless, I pull each version apart analytically to find common ground between them in the assumptions that they make about capitalism and class politics within it. I begin with the first, antifeminism version, which claims that backlash arises out of a clash between moral worldviews: one feminist and modern, the other antifeminist and traditional.

The traditional worldview is committed to gender essentialism and the cultural values associated with it, often religious beliefs, that warrant keeping some model of the nuclear, heterosexual family intact. It is viewed as virtuous and natural that women labor in the service of their families, which is the basic moral unit of society rather than the individual (Luker 1984, 158–91; Clarke 1987; Kelley, Evans, and Headey 1993). By contrast, feminism represents autonomy in one's work and sexual life, rejecting the notion that childbearing is a constitutive part of who women are. Feminism challenges tradition, and abortion is the ultimate symbol of that challenge because it subordinates family-making to individual self-interest. Thus, abortion rights incur the wrath of those who resent feminism's perversion of the natural order and blame it for economic changes (Gordon 2002, 303–7). For instance, Susan Faludi's classic Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women argues that resistance to reproductive rights seeks to “turn the clock back to 1954” and to reverse the feminist successes of the 1970s (Faludi 1991). Importantly, traditionalism assumes that women are inferior, so they require paternalistic interventions in their reproductive choices. Paternalism results in pathologizing reproductive health when medical professionals, religious institutions, and the government claim to understand women's needs and desires better than women themselves. They can then reassert control over reproduction against the grain of newly established reproductive rights, which threatened the legitimacy of this control (Guglielmo 2018, 27–46 esp. 33).

The second, anti-civil-rights version of the backlash thesis posits that, in the United States, there is nothing more traditional than racism. Indeed, if one wants to understand antifeminist backlash, then one must root traditional morality firmly in white supremacy. Prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, abortion politics had always been about contesting the proper use of Anglo-Saxon reproductive capacities (Beisel and Kay 2004). “Traditional” remains a code for “white,” which is a constitutive exclusion of nonwhite women from the so-called dignity of white women's place in the gender binary. Their lives and the lives of their children do not have the same value that white women's do, so traditional moralists see their fertility as a problem to be managed and manipulated as opposed to encouraged (Goodwin 2020). Thus, traditionalism tries to control women's sexuality, but it tries to control racial groups differently. From this point of view, there is a tight epistemic and political unity between traditionalist movements against reproductive rights and for white supremacy. Backlash finds common cause among a range of actors in the government, medical profession, and Anglo-Saxon political constituencies that have an interest in controlling the fertility of Black, indigenous, and immigrant women while encouraging childbirth among white women. What traditional morality demands is not submissive women within patriarchal family structures so much as submissive white women who make white babies and women of color who do not have the means to populate the nation with nonwhite babies on their own terms. Thus, antiabortion politics are a political and cultural response to demographic-based status anxiety. Antiabortion politics are fundamentally a means of demographic and biopolitical control (Mason 2000; 2002; Weingarten 2011; Ross 2018).

The backlash thesis is attractive for two important reasons. First, it identifies the intuitions that many feminists share regarding the moral polarity of the abortion discourse in the United States but also feminism in general. Second, the thesis deepens the complexity of this intuition by claiming that racism is constitutive of this polarity, which makes it possible for one to account for contradictory empirical phenomena (antiabortion, pro-population control) in the same story. This unified story is of great normative value, since the juxtaposition between the norms of white womanhood and those of nonwhite womanhood exposes the moral worldview in which both whiteness and femininity are valuable and deviations from it are not. Thus, strategies to control fertility that seem contradictory are only apparently so.

It is also important to note the historical political context. The backlash thesis had understandable appeal in the decades immediately following the women's liberation and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. These New Left movements were succeeded by the rise of the New Right in the United States, which certainly seemed like a backlash. Certainly, backlash, or reaction, is a part of this story for some actors, and they did indeed pull together a coalition that used abortion as its wedge issue, which served to justify a broader conservative agenda. The abortion issue actually served to rally diverse right-wing constituencies around a seemingly straightforward moral position, making it easier to involve them in apparently related electoral campaigns (including those that suited a white-supremacist agenda, that is, for “states’ rights” that restrict abortion, but that have also historically created legal precedent for segregation). It was reasonable to think that what motivated and therefore in some significant way caused this movement was resentment of social progress. Nonetheless, I think this thesis should have less purchase now. It is no longer so simple to pair the misogynist and white-supremacist moments of contemporary conservative movements against reproductive rights. An adequate analysis of the contemporary political terrain must be able to account for important ideological and demographic changes within conservative movements.

One important change is how the antiabortion movement uses the language of feminism in a way that resonates for its young people. The modern discourse of “prolife feminism” is a recent appropriation of longstanding (left) feminist critiques of prochoice feminism for its elitism and for failing to take racism and class inequality seriously. Prolife feminism positions itself against liberal feminism's narrow focus on self-interest, in favor of supportive communities in which to raise children. The latter say they are prolife in the robust sense that they are the ones who care the most about women's material needs and well-being. Their sidewalk counselors outside of clinics now promise pregnant people food, housing, and baby clothes if they give birth. Prolife feminists argue that social welfare is an acceptable trade-off for reproductive rights in a robust vision for reproductive justice (see Derr in Ross et al. 2017, 86–110).¹ What is notable is that the prowoman turn of this antiabortion discourse portends to address economic poverty in a way that differs from the population control doctrines of previous generations. It also takes for granted a modern work culture and women within it.

Another important change is how the antiabortion movement uses the language of antiracism in a way that resonates with a wider constituency than before. It is difficult to ascertain the scope and significance of certain movement trends, but there is clearly an increase in the diversity of the antiabortion movement. It is undergoing significant demographic shifts of its own to form a broad coalition that includes white supremacists, prolife feminists, increasing numbers of people of color, along with the Catholics and evangelical Christians whom one would normally associate with traditional moralism. Anti-LGBT evangelicals and racist skinheads now participate in the same antiabortion demonstrations with Latino/a Catholics and Black Baptists who accuse clinic workers and escorts of being extensions of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, a key discursive shift is widespread adoption of the Black genocide myth, which claims that women of color are being manipulated to commit a genocide via abortion and is now standard ideological fare across the whole movement (for analysis and refutation of this myth, see Dobbins-Harris 2017). It is now common for both sides of the abortion debate to claim the mantle of antiracism, with antiabortion actors encouraging the courts and the public to view eugenics, population control policies, and abortion rights as the same thing (for analysis and refutation of this trend, see Ziegler 2013). In sum, not only does antiabortion discourse now portend to be prowoman, but antiracist as well (Camosy 2017; Cho 2017; Andrews 2020; Bonnette 2020).²

Moving now from the ideological terrain to that of public policy, it is notable that the punitive effects of current policies surrounding abortion access do not consistently map onto the fault lines of race (white versus nonwhite) or gender (familial self-sacrifice versus market self-interest) as the backlash thesis describes them. Consider a recent example during the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought with it “[t]he most extreme shut down of abortion access allowed by federal courts since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision declared access to abortion a constitutional right” (Keating, Tierney, and Meko 2020). ³ In the rush to shut down inessential businesses and institutions to stop the virus from spreading, abortion clinics came under attack. Politicians and advocates argued that women have no right to demand abortions during a public health crisis and denounced the failure of women to acknowledge the sacrifice that society demanded of them. They claimed that pandemic healthcare workers are making impossible choices for who lives and who dies, so this is hard to square with “those who are promoting procedures that intentionally leave one of two patients dead every time” (Allen 2020). The policy advisor for a leading antiabortion group called Texas Values said, “Once again abortion providers, who believe they are entitled to special treatment, have been put back in their place. In this current pandemic, medical supplies and personal protective equipment should be used for saving lives, not taking them” (Wesolek 2020). What these claims amount to is an argument that women should stop asking for special treatment that usurps resources for selfish ends, which is a betrayal of the public interest.⁴

As the backlash thesis predicts, antiabortion partisans claimed that reproductive rights are an exercise in selfishness, but unlike what the thesis predicts, they deployed this argument in the service of further subordinating working women to the market forces that supposedly encourage the self-interested behavior that they otherwise lament. They wanted women to both work and give birth, which conveniently ignored that women might need abortions to continuously work in the public interest in the healthcare sector, for instance, which is disproportionately made up of women of all races and ethnicities. As Alexis McGill Johnson and Marsha Jones put it succinctly in Essence, “Your job is deemed essential, but your abortion is not: black low-wage women of Texas are being robbed of their humanity” (Johnson and Jones 2020). If the antifeminist version of the backlash thesis were true, then one would expect more traditionalist rigidity in the norms surrounding work and reproduction than currently exists. They would want to push white women back into the home. And if the anti-civil-rights version of the backlash thesis is true, then one would likewise expect demographic anxiety to remain ideologically front and center or to somehow make exceptions for working-class women who are somehow deemed “undesirable.” Neither seems to have been the case; they wanted full shutdowns. And it is generally the “undesirable” mothers who are most affected by these laws. How is this fact consistent with the idea that the right mostly wants to force “desirable” (white, able-bodied) mothers to give birth? Even if abortion laws help mobilize the right around other issues as well, this strategy seems like it has long been undermining a central goal of the white-supremacist part of its base.

In my view, the pandemic abortion debate reveals a long-standing discrepancy between the backlash thesis and contemporary political reality. It articulates a static race- and gender-centric analysis of social status without considering how class politics shifts the terrain. But it is not only a matter of excluding class. It is also a matter of having a concept of capitalism that operates implicitly within a framework that gives capitalism the benefit of the doubt of being “modern.” Liberal feminists have long agreed with traditionalists that capitalism generates norms that are indifferent to gender and race, like voluntary exchange, bodily autonomy, and self-interest, that run against the grain of traditional morality. The difference, however, is that liberal feminists think that these developments are good for women (Cudd and Holmstrom 2011; Cudd 2015). The very notion of a backlash implicitly takes up this point of view by assuming that market forces promote values and norms that are antithetical to traditional racial and gender hierarchies. If markets encourage status-leveling, then resistance to social change must be a symptom of familiar and intransigent forms of moral backwardness. The result of this assumption is that the backlash thesis is simply the mirror image of the position to which it is opposed. What follows, and what I find increasingly implausible, is that conservatives once formed into a grand coalition that has been in backlash mode with the same motivations for the past fifty years, over and against the significant empirical and normative changes that neoliberal capitalism has wrought upon new generations.

One way of summarizing my objections to the backlash thesis thus far is that I think these developments should unmoor some of the current common-sense feminist reactions to conservative reproductive politics today. The stakes of this argument include gaining a better insight into the obstacles to expanding reproductive rights under contemporary conditions. One might object by claiming that the ideological changes are simply surface level, or the justifications for public policy positions mask real motives, whereas the deep causes and motives are unremitting, traditionalist racism and misogyny. Perhaps, but I think the surface matters, as do the structural changes to our reproductive lives that generate shifts in how people think about these issues. If there is enough discrepancy with our common-sense narratives on the surface, of which the two sides to the backlash thesis are one, then there is a warrant for revising those narratives. I am interested in structural reasons why, beyond apparent moral conviction, a diverse conservative coalition might remain attractive and what continues to bring it together today.

III. Social Reproduction Theory as an Explanatory Framework

An alternative to the backlash thesis must account for two seemingly contradictory trends, pronatalism and neo-Malthusian “antinatalism,” the latter of which is a dominant theory of demographic and economic change that has been rightly challenged by feminist critics for justifying a host of reproductive abuses like eugenics-inspired sterilization campaigns and coercive, long-term birth-control policies. I have argued that the backlash thesis has too many inconsistencies with contemporary ideological, demographic, and policy trends to provide such an account. But there are feminist critics of neo-Malthusian economics in particular who have taken class and poverty more seriously as causal variables in their explanations for what drives these forms of reproductive control. In the latter category are theorists of reproductive justice who criticize liberalism's inability to do the same. I now focus on why these critiques of neo-Malthusianism have still been unable to break from the liberal narrative, despite offering key insights into its class character.

I then introduce social reproduction theory (SRT) as an alternative explanatory framework that can illuminate the material basis for what presents itself as a backlash from a liberal point of view. SRT is useful here because it explains the systemic link between capitalism's dependence on labor power and the reproductive activity (both social and biological) required to meet demands for it. Indeed, “social reproduction” is the summation of such activities. Importantly, SRT shows how reproductive life—most notably but not exclusively in the family—is strongly responsive to the pressures of capitalist markets in a contradictory way. I claim that identifying a system-level contradiction between capitalist markets and social reproduction is key to an analysis of the problems to which a diverse array of political actors (from conservative social movements to state policy makers to nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) are responding. SRT as an explanatory framework helps to support my normative reconstruction of the political logics of both pronatalism and antinatalism in the subsequent and final section.

Many social-scientific studies emphasize the importance of social class to reproductive politics. These studies are normally conducted by theorists of reproductive justice, a paradigm that is critical of liberal “prochoice” perspectives on reproductive rights and has become increasingly central to the reproductive rights world of activism and NGO work. Reproductive justice theorists criticize liberal ones for narrowing the scope of reproductive rights to simply being able to choose whether to have an abortion, which neglects the socioeconomic conditions under which people make such a choice and whether the choice is substantively available as opposed to just being available legally to the letter of the law. Reproductive rights must therefore be situated within a broader normative horizon of reproductive justice if they are to be exercised in a noncoercive way that empowers sexual agency in supportive relationships with stronger social protections. Clearly, the reproductive-justice paradigm has a more egalitarian, antipoverty approach to empowering the most vulnerable demographics within the population to exercise greater control in their reproductive lives.

The reproductive justice tradition also diagnoses the role that poverty and class plays in undermining reproductive rights. Indeed, widely acknowledged thus far about class in reproductive-justice research is that lawmakers, government agencies, and medical professionals become increasingly preoccupied with poor people's fertility during socioeconomic crises, so there is at least a correlation between economic health and reproductive intervention and control. Ideologically, feminist critics argue that these institutions justify strategies of intervention and control by blaming the poor for their poverty based on their “irresponsible” sexual behavior, whether this behavior be procreating too much or too little. Neo-Malthusian economics is the target of many such feminist critiques; many scholars claim that its premises are weaponized to legitimate unjust social policies that strip poor women of reproductive rights through victim-blaming.

Before I assess the feminist critiques, I will offer a clarifying word about Malthusian theories of demographic and economic change. Thomas Malthus argued that population grows when living standards rise. When agricultural producers improve technology, the technology increases labor productivity, which enables the average economic output to grow along with the human population that this improvement in living standards can support. Both incomes and population increase, so there are more farmers to work land. Eventually, there is less land per farmer, which induces a diminishing average product of labor, falling incomes, and then a decrease in population once again, albeit with improved technological capacity. What makes Malthus relevant to the analysis here is that capitalism broke the Malthusian cycle with a historically unprecedented and massive increase in the productivity of labor.⁵ And yet later, under capitalist conditions, neo-Malthusians would continue to argue that overpopulation remains a drain on resources under capitalism, so societies must try to lower fertility rates themselves. They claimed that overpopulation is the source of poverty, crime, and bloated state budgets. They then hypothesized that controlling fertility can control poverty by man-made means as opposed to natural cycles.

Feminist critics show how neo-Malthusian ideas have been politicized in public health campaigns targeting the fertility of poor women from different demographics at different junctures. For instance, the idea of a “relief baby” emerged during the 1930s, and the racist “welfare queen” proliferated during a tough economic recession in the 1990s (Guglielmo 2018). In the first case, public health and state agencies sterilized white women en masse during the Great Depression; their children were called relief babies because the mothers were blamed for draining relief coffers (Ross and Solinger 2017, 34–35). In the second case, similar institutions deployed racist, victim-blaming justifications for controlling the reproductive behavior of poor Black women, leading Dorothy Roberts to famously write that “Poor Black mothers are blamed for perpetuating social problems by transmitting defective genes, irreparable crack damage, and a deviant lifestyle to their children” (Roberts 1997, 3). These examples suggest a relationship between strategies of reproductive control and economic crises; the effects of neo-Malthusian policies are to justify reducing access to public funds for all poor and working people even when they especially target one group. Along these lines, Patricia Hill Collins points out that racial ideologies took on a class-based character in the post-civil rights era, when Black women in the United States became targets of population control (Collins 2004, 122). She notes, “Symbolic means of domination become particularly important in mediating contradictions in changing political economies” (Collins 1990, 171). Jenna Lloyd goes so far as to suggest that these dynamics are analogous to a war economy that serves the purpose of demanding that women make reproductive sacrifices for the common good (Lloyd 2014, 180). As Rickie Solinger puts it succinctly, there is convergence around the idea that motherhood has been a class privilege in America (Solinger 2001; Solinger and Nakachi 2016, 63–97).

In my view, these critiques of neo-Malthusianism are closer to the mark than either version of the backlash thesis that I identified in the previous section. They give reasons for why there is a current reality (poverty) that provokes some political response on the part of various actors involved in managing the reproductive health of the population. In other words, they are not backward looking, but are instead trying to understand how economic changes relate to ideological ones. Yet they do not pull away completely from the liberal perspective. They leave two important questions unanswered that lead me to think that the backlash thesis is “just under the hood,” as it were. First and most important, they do not explain why an anachronistic economic theory like neo-Malthusianism remains attractive under capitalist conditions. Capitalism is, after all, the system that broke the Malthusian cycle, and there are alternative paths of development to consider; one can observe that there are capitalist countries with less punitive attitudes toward reproduction that provide more resources for pregnant people, single parents, and dependents. What makes for this difference? Second, critiques of neo-Malthusianism are state-centric in the sense that they focus mostly on the policies carried out by state governments and affiliated NGOs. Are the legitimating strategies and goals of these institutions always the same, given significant shifts in the class composition of the society, their own institutional constraints, and contemporary ideological changes regarding gender, race, and sexual morality? It is in response to these questions that I suspect the backlash would re-enter the frame. One could simply argue that the various state agencies and NGOs that make up the public health system are acting out the demographic anxieties that affect the population at large. The United States is exceptionally racist, so a backlash against civil rights and multiracial democracy is the answer to both questions (Ross 2018).

I am not satisfied with this reproductive version of American exceptionalism for a couple of reasons: Women in the United States currently rely heavily on non-profit NGOs to provide healthcare and family services, whose legal advocates, political lobbyists, and public relations personnel are increasingly adopting a reproductive-justice framework to articulate how they see their role.⁶ Given such trends, one must ask if it is self-evident that population control policies are always and everywhere politically viable, or if the dominant ideology surrounding reproductive health aligns so comfortably with those of conservative movements. When it comes to abortion, one must make sense of the fact that the antiabortion movement no longer speaks in a unified racial voice. People of color within the antiabortion movement often voice the opposite motivations to what is normally attributed to their white peers when it comes to demographic anxiety. Moreover, their organizations are increasingly turning their attention to activism in urban areas with higher concentrations of people of color (the abortion “capitals of the world”), which suggests that the movement as a whole is not exclusively concerned about the fertility of white women.

In my view, the backlash thesis becomes a way to save the phenomena when it comes to illuminating the ongoing salience of both racist and misogynist sentiments to the discourse surrounding reproductive rights. These attitudes remain ideological cornerstones of conservative reproductive politics despite their adaptations over time, so one does not want to lose the plot as far as they are concerned. However, this phenomena-saving effort sublates inconsistent trends into the backlash narrative for lack of an alternative, over and against the political and ideological changes that I have mentioned. There is a way to retrieve consistency, but it requires taking a deeper look at the category of class and mobilizing a more systematic account of it into a different explanatory framework. Indeed, a failure to do so is where liberal feminism and the reproductive justice paradigms converge. What is “liberal” about reproductive justice is that it combines a state-centric analysis with a rather static one of poverty—class mostly describes those who are impoverished rather than explains why they are in poverty—which then takes for granted the constraints that the class structure places on all actors. Thus, it misses some of what motivates those actors.

Altogether, I have pointed out trends that deviate from what the backlash thesis predicts and argued that they should pique interest in an alternative framework rather than attempting to assimilate anomalies into a familiar one. I turn now to SRT, which is a research program within feminist political economy claiming that there is a systematic relationship between capitalism, the conditions of reproductive life, and gender oppression. This framework is of interest to those who are trying to understand reproductive politics because “contradiction” is one of its central terms. Its core explanatory claim is that market competition subordinates reproductive activities to its constraints. In fact, there is a latent contradiction between them, which has far-reaching effects beyond the workplace. I now explain the basic tenets of this view before I return to what it illuminates about the persistence of pronatalist and antinatalist tendencies under contemporary conditions. In brief, a contradictory system is liable to garner equally contradictory reactions, which reflects systemic contiguity.

SRT adopts the Marxian view that labor-market dependency of direct producers (labor) and appropriators (capital) is a precondition for capitalism's competitive constraints on both labor and capital. What emerges is an economic system that produces for exchange value instead of for use value, which, in nontechnical language, means that capital competes for profit by cutting prices and retaining market shares in various types of consumer markets. Labor, on the other hand, must compete to work for capital for access to wages and, therefore, the means of subsistence. Marxists have often argued that workers are exploited and coerced in this process. SRT agrees but argues that exploitation is not the only injustice to be found here. What transpires alongside exploitation is capitalism's separation of production and reproduction and its subordination of the latter to the former.

Workers produce and sell commodities for exchange, and they prepare others to produce and sell them as well. In other words, workers need to work, but they also need to regenerate their own capacity to labor, which is a process that is both social and biological in nature. Simply put, someone must do the reproductive labor needed for regeneration—birth, death, childrearing, housework, education, healthcare, and so on. Social reproductive labor has a close historical tie with childbearing. Lise Vogel writes, “What raises the question of gender is, of course the phenomenon of generational replacement of bearers of labour-power—that is, the replacement of existing workers by new workers from the next generation” (Vogel 2013, 146). The gender of those bearing children is not, of course, preordained. But childbearing takes on a particular social meaning and thus gender “within certain modes of societal and social reproduction that have specific features” (Arruzza, 2016, 22; Bhattacharya and Fraser 2018, 22). In class societies generally, it is women of the laboring classes who have historically played a differential role in the reproduction of labor power.

In capitalist societies specifically, women have a volatile relationship with the labor market because their capacities for childbearing threaten to diminish their contribution to the process of appropriation (Vogel 2013, 151). Women must exit the labor market during birth and during the earliest phases of childcare, which means that when and if they re-enter the labor market, they do so through competition. But now employers see them as unreliable, expendable, and willing to work for less to “get back in the game.” They can reduce the time of absence from the workforce, but childbearing continues to represent a potentially costly decline of a woman's capacity to work. Reproductive cycles are often under surveillance, with pregnant women seen as a slowdown problem for the labor process (Wright 2006, 85–87). For these reasons, gender-based labor struggles in capitalist societies characteristically emphasize reforms like parental leave without penalty, healthcare, and early childhood care. They have challenged the subordination of reproduction to production. Where these struggles have been successful, they have, to a greater or lesser extent, obliged capital to contribute to the process of reproduction, mostly through taxation for various social programs. Occasionally, capital has had to provide services directly in the workplace.

Family structures are particularly important for understanding the gendered nature of capitalist reproduction. They are principal sites in which workers organize themselves outside the labor market, usually around who can compete successfully within it. A division of labor also usually arises within households, given that those who do not give birth tend to be more competitive. However, social reproduction strategies differ based on the concrete labor markets in which a social group is involved. Under these conditions, the household becomes a specific, “private” site of social reproduction that supports both workers and those who cannot work. SRT claims that capitalism does not functionally require a particular family form. What families look like in terms of gender composition or number of members will depend on some combination of the state of the labor market, what social protections exist, and cultural shifts in sexual morality. Nonetheless, one can ascertain basic trends in market-dependent family life relative to these other factors.

One basic trend amounts to an empirical contradiction. Capitalism systematically undermines its own conditions for social reproduction, despite its being essential to social cohesion beyond the labor market and its role in ensuring the reproduction of labor power within it. Nancy Fraser explains:

[E]very form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated “crisis tendency” or contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other, capitalism's orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. This social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism lies at the root of the so-called crisis of care. Although inherent in capitalism as such, it assumes a different and distinctive guise in every historically specific form of capitalist society. (Fraser 2016, 100)

Fraser explains this self-undermining tendency further by describing how changes to the way that capitalism organizes production influence the organization of reproduction. Part and parcel to class conflict historically is how working people have adjusted to these “economic” changes and influenced them in return to try to satisfy “noneconomic” needs that are not met by the market alone. The social reproductive dimension to class conflict involves reconfiguring the relationship between capitalist firms, families, and states to provide social welfare. For example, state-managed capitalism of the late twentieth century was characterized by large-scale industrial production, a high rate of profit, and thus the capacity of the state to internalize social welfare through taxation. By contrast, financialized capitalism has relocated manufacturing to low-wage regions, has struggled to maintain the rate of profit (and thus to tax capital) and has externalized care work away from the state and onto families. In transitioning thus, capitalism tends to undermine the social reproductive capacities on which it relies.

My claim is that one can expect this contradictory structural dynamic to have equally contradictory ideological effects. Specifically, capitalism generates normative conflict around changes to what people expect out of family life and how such expectations are managed, especially by the state. When these expectations are undermined or threatened, they lead to pronatalist or antinatalist ideas, depending on time, place, and institutional backdrop. I now turn to developing the latter claim more fully by showing that normative conflict over historically specific expectations of family life leads to equally specific demands upon working women and the state to regulate reproduction in one way or another.

IV. Capitalism's Moral Economy: Backlash or Bourgeois?

Social reproduction theory claims that capitalism is contradictory because it systematically undermines its own conditions for social reproduction. This section reconstructs some of the normative development of such a self-undermining system. I identify conflicting expectations of reproductive life (most notably of families and the state) in capitalist societies. I show that what emerges is a political logic in which pronatalism and neo-Malthusian antinatalism are both ways of mitigating the effects of capitalism's undertow pull on reproductive life. I then argue further that what emerges is a modern moral economy of reproduction that is rather specific to capitalism. By moral economy, I mean a political logic that tends to justify and enforce gendered social presumptions about men taking and women giving valuable goods and services like sex, household labor, childbearing, and emotional support (Manne 2018). The notion of a moral economy helps to reconstruct how the moral features that one normally associates with the traditional morality of an abstract past become, in my story, quite modern: the old becomes new again.

Recall that the increasing dependence of families on the labor market differentially affects those who bear children and tends to result in a gendered division of labor in the private sphere. The constraints of labor-market dependency place distinct pressures on families. In general, childrearing increasingly relies on a family structure to ensure both economic security and social betterment for fewer children as well as for the family across generations. What follows is that this dependency has some peculiar effects on the practical aspects of human fertility. Centrally, it makes the number of children one can support dependent on the access that one has to the labor market. Such circumstances cast the bearing of children in a different economic-strategic light than before; individuals and families begin to calibrate how many children to have and when they should have them in response to the resources that are available (Petchesky 1990). In other words, the safety-first strategies of peasant-producing societies, like having as many children as possible to work land, ensure inheritance, or ward off the effects of disease (given the limits of medical science), fall to the wayside in favor of family planning.

This incentive structure creates a different sense of value around children that is likewise calibrated to the resources available to the family in which they are born. Normative expectations emerge that one should not have more children than one can afford, which brings with it an appeal to sexual restraint in the service of material prosperity. What these transformations amount to are expectations that families ought to prioritize the quality over the quantity of their children unless they have the resources to do both. Expectations also emerge that families should be socially cohesive and self-sustaining sites of reproduction, which is why families appear to many as somehow timeless moral foundations amid the otherwise cold and changing winds of capitalist competition. As Angela Davis writes, capitalism situates the domestic sphere and the women within it at its utopian fringes (nurturing, self-sacrificing), thus making the home seem like the antithesis to the capitalist performance principle (efficient, self-interested). One also expects families to procreate the right amount to create value in quality children, which involves socializing them to internalize the norms of market competition (Davis 1998, 175–81). The moral language that identifies a successful individual is thus remarkably transferable to whole families in American political discourse—“hardworking families.” The flip side, however, is that the irresponsible family can carry the blame of social instability and dysfunction.

Historically specific expectations emerge of women, too, who are primarily responsible for childrearing and reproductive labor. Indeed, they once made it possible to redefine women's social role as primarily motherhood. This cultural phenomenon was obvious in the Victorian period, known for its glorification of domesticity; however, a “cult of motherhood” persists for women with means. Twenty-first-century mothers similarly report pressure to supplement contracted labor markets with increasingly perfect and exacting maternal nurturing to increase their child's social capital. One expects that they should be responsible for accommodating and facilitating changes to the economy that they are not, in fact, responsible for. These are gender norms, broadly construed, and they invite various reactions directed toward women when women are perceived as unrestrained, irresponsible, or otherwise as moral failures. Indeed, one such reaction is the pronatalist urge to preserve “family values” when normative expectations of family life and the women within it are not met.

Pronatalist reactions are mediated by the institutional backdrop of family life, however, and the expectations these reactions produce tend to contribute to the overall context in which one responds to competitive constraints. Many political demands gain legitimacy through contestation within and against the state, which establishes the broadest possible consensus in a capitalist society on the normative criteria for acceptable “boundary crossing” between what it considers public and private. The compulsion to establish normative criteria for boundary crossing is what I take to be the basis of the long-standing feminist call to make the personal political. This appeal carries no immediate water for capital, which is (all things being equal, like the absence of a strong labor movement) unwilling to absorb the costs of social reproduction directly, but moreover, it is the state and not capital that experiences organic pressures to get involved in reproduction, which forces the state to show interest in the population's size and composition (again ceteris paribus, or without organized pressure on capital to the contrary).⁷ These pressures come from decreasing tax revenue if capital's contribution weakens, if real incomes decline, if an aging population needs social services, if low birth rates make future taxable income uncertain, or if a surplus population cannot integrate into the labor market due to a mismatch of skills. There is, therefore, also an opening for antinatalist reactions and to see some women's reproduction as a net harm on the state's ability to manage these pressures.

In my view, the class effects of these expectations of family and state are key to understanding how pronatalist and antinatalist reactions combine in a seemingly contradictory, uneven, but altogether contiguous way. Working-class women are the demographic that tends to politicize reproduction. Their poverty, children, and social mores often make public what should be private, which carries an implicit appeal for social protection from the changing winds of the labor market and the movement of capital. There is an inevitable collision course between both public opinion and the capitalist state with working-class women's families. Working-class women who have not met the criteria for legitimacy threaten to upset whatever norms of entitlement to social protections prevail. In this context, it might become politically viable to discipline reproductive behaviors that threaten the current consensus on the appropriate institutional boundaries between state, family, and economy. These forms of discipline may be public birth-control campaigns and/or constricting public resources so severely that it becomes shameful to seek them out. The reason that such moral and political discipline remains politically salient over and against the strong compulsions of market forces is that the discipline is a response to the contradictory demands that those forces place upon working families; capitalism pulls women out of the private sphere and into the workforce, but the demands of social reproduction push them back into it. How a society mitigates these pressures sets the terms for what counts as a legitimate boundary crossing.

The result is that working-class women are in the unhappy position of generating normative conflict over the status quo when conditions of capitalist production, and thus the labor market, change. Conflicts emerge when it becomes clear that working-class families tend to undermine these various, contradictory expectations and make a different set of demands on the rest of society, and it is the women of this class who bear the brunt of the blame for perceived reproductive failures. Indeed, the moral consequences of their supposed irresponsibility differ significantly by class; working-class women are liable to turn to the public sphere for social protection. Unlike their wealthier counterparts, they are more likely to raise the question implicitly or explicitly of what the state is doing to protect women and children from precarity than, for instance, to hire additional domestic help or write an op-ed to ask whether there is a lifestyle solution to being a good mother. The reproductive behavior of working-class women has thus been an object for public concern, as the history of middle-class moral reformers, feminist or otherwise, shows. Working-class women are often the target of reform movements led by middle-class women to prevent alcohol consumption, encourage the use of birth control, spread eugenic practices, and stabilize marriage rates by instilling religious values in the sexually promiscuous.⁸ Other social strata often perceive the reproductive behavior of the working class as a threat to feminine decorum, decency, and the sanctity of motherhood (Gordon 2002, 305). It follows that working-class women tend to threaten the norm that families can and should take sole responsibility for social reproduction.

Amid these conflicting norms and attempts to ameliorate their inconsistencies lie appeals to tradition that remain compelling. Tradition does not simply “melt into air,” as Marx put it, but adapts to capitalist constraints. The process of adaptation involves attempts to resolve conflicts over social reproduction that form the basis upon which a society deliberates about the next crisis and the next. The sexual behavior of working families is evaluated based on earlier shifts in the scope of familial responsibility and state intervention, plus their accompanying sexual mores. These dynamics suggest that any given coalition of moralists that calls itself “prolife” or something else may not be so traditional in the prefeminist or pre-civil-rights sense. They are rather traditional in a contemporary sense, as the cultural imaginary of what is traditional and how people try to put that image into practice shifts accordingly.

For instance, it is common for American conservatives to argue that welfare programs are responsible for undermining (what they assert are) traditional Black family structures by incentivizing Black women to “marry the state” instead of husbands and for Black men to neglect their responsibility as fathers. They are outraged on the public's behalf if they, by proxy, feel that they are being taken advantage of or manipulated by irresponsible women and families. In the background of this appeal to a traditional family structure (and thus attributing social ills to the lack thereof) are normally important shifts in the political economy, like the Great Society programs of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. These were implemented concurrently with the onset of deindustrialization, which, according to conservatives, made Black women too dependent on the state and Black men unmotivated to work. But what was really happening was a diminishing of the tax base that supported the meager welfare state by way of underemployment, stagnant wages, and capital flight. My position is strongly that the conservative arguments are completely upside-down in their diagnosis of the problem, but their diagnostic appeal to tradition was a response to a real contemporary one. At that juncture, there was enough state capacity and ideological consent within it to make population control a viable public health policy for poor women.

A racist sort of neo-Malthusianism may be viable in one instance but not in another. Today, the welfare state has been emaciated to the point that there are few social services, and NGOs are often operating as primary service-providers. In this context, it may be more counterintuitive to claim that immigrants and Black people are taking advantage of a welfare state by having too many children. If such a state does not exist anymore in the experience of most Americans and increasing numbers of people favor more state spending, not less, then this victim-blaming approach may appeal to a smaller constituency than in previous generations. Moreover, the NGOs have a different governing ideology that is more attuned to avoiding racist discrimination, however poorly they succeed due to few resources and lack of autonomy from private interests, and they vary widely from one another in their political agendas. I raise these changes in the institutional backdrop of reproductive politics to simply say that they matter a great deal for reflecting on the many afterlives of Thomas Malthus. Neo-Malthusian outcomes are not necessarily fixed by a ready-made white-supremacist coalition in the state apparatus. The situation is rather more complex, dysfunctional, and has a lot of moving parts, all of which are relevant to attributing causality to any one part.

One can also see how appeals to tradition in the antiabortion movement today reflect a diversity of motives and interests rather than unmediated misogynistic and demographic anxieties, so it can attract a wider political constituency than feminists have normally thought. Desires to keep the family intact need not come from only one direction. For instance, prolife feminists might encourage charity to poor women to help them give birth, or in a few cases support expanding state-sponsored social services, depending on whether they think the economic terrain is favorable to raising a family. Black antiabortion activists might join in coalition with the same prolife feminists for the opposite reasons: to prevent the medical establishment and the state from interfering with family life based on a history of past abuses. The family is the only experience of collective labor and solidarity that many people now have, so protecting its privacy and thus moral standing can make a great deal of sense. Thus, religious conservatives of all races and ethnicities may adopt a punitive attitude toward bad women who are insubordinate or a paternalistic attitude toward women who know not the severity of their sins. White supremacists do indeed want to force white women to give birth because they resent their lack of commitment to family life or fear demographic change. In other words, the pronatalism of today need not be your grandpa's pronatalism.

In sum, appeals to tradition obscure and reconcile normative conflicts over what people expect from women, family, and the state. Capitalism is the precondition for these conflicts rather than being antithetical to them, so tradition emerges and re-emerges in a manner that is neither static nor irrelevant, distinctively modern, and which amounts to a moral economy whose political logic reflects more than a simple backlash dynamic. To my mind, the concept of a moral economy helps to avoid facile functionalist explanations for capitalism's gendered effects. In the past, socialist feminists have argued that certain forms of gender oppression are functionally required by capitalism as a glue that supports it materially and justifies it politically. The point of a functionalist explanation is to explain a phenomenon by its effects in forming a stable equilibrium, so here one can explain gender oppression by its effect in facilitating capital accumulation. Functionalism is not the perspective that I am adopting here because it strikes me that functionalism is also unable to account for the political dynamism that I have pointed out throughout this essay. If capitalism would otherwise collapse without specific kinds of gender oppression, then I do not see what explains how it continues trucking along anyway despite constantly undermining its own conditions for social reproduction, significant shifts in gender norms, and with ongoing contests over family form. Moreover, the story I am telling is not one of a coherent interest by one or more parties in, say, profitability or male privilege. There are many interests at stake for people reacting to similar constraints.

My conclusion, which would require a lengthier defense, is that gender oppression and its accompanying norms are more like a secular developmental trend than a functional necessity of the capitalist system. Having said this, I think that it makes sense to try to see the normative side to this development as a moral economy that reflects on and tries to reconcile with shifting political-economic terrain in a manner that is path-dependent, even if not not necessarily serving one coherent interest. The notion of a moral economy helps to conceptualize what it means to say in everyday language that conservative social movements are reactionary, in the sense that they are reacting to constraints, pressures, and violations of norms that they have come to anticipate, without allowing a notion of backlash to carry the explanatory weight. Kate Manne describes a gendered moral economy as one in which men take and women give valuable goods and services, and in which women incur discipline if they violate certain prohibitions, like refusing to give those goods and services or taking masculine-coded perks and privileges instead (Manne 2018). Discipline can range from withdrawing social approval to violence. This giving and taking of gendered goods and services maps well enough to what one expects of women under current conditions of social reproduction, and reactions to their failure to live up to the expectations therein run the gamut from disapproval to invading or bombing women's health clinics.

Although I find Manne's description of a moral economy useful, my analysis differs because I am not working with a concept of patriarchy to explain gender inequality. I am giving alternative reasons for why this moral economy remains tractable regarding reproductive rights and what exactly are the advantages of maintaining it. Whereas Manne's are male-coded entitlement and esteem, mine are a society's moral intuitions regarding reproductive responsibility, irresponsibility, and what it considers as a public concern. Certain reproductive behaviors threaten to upset prevailing expectations, thus requiring discipline. Returning to the pandemic abortion-access debate as an example, recall that this was an instance in which the antiabortion crowd claimed that women seeking abortions are frivolous and selfish, with no real health needs in comparison to COVID-19 patients. They construed abortion an assault on the public interest by women who were asking for care, or the kind of thing they were meant to be giving in the home, hospital, and especially the workplace. In this case, the reality to which all parties are responding is a polity with no consensus on public health, nor on healthcare (let alone abortion) as a right, and an institutional backdrop that isolates abortion care from the mainstream of the healthcare system, making it politically conspicuous and vulnerable.

A final word on the liberal point of view on these issues. In sum, I break from the liberal narrative by redefining what is meant by traditional and showing that it amounts to much more than a backlash dynamic. The liberal feminist perspective is that capitalism undermines racial and gender hierarchies and thus generates anxiety about social and not economic status. Ann Cudd, for instance, argues that “mutual advantage through the logic of voluntary exchange” is a liberating norm inspired by capitalist markets in contrast to backward sexist and racist attitudes (Cudd 2015, 769). Therefore, liberals tend to claim that it is anxiety about changes in social status that prompts backlash against reproductive rights. One might still conclude that the normative conflicts I have described here are simply signs of how capitalism instigates progressive change and how people resist that change.

I have argued that there is more to this story that has to do with how capitalism generates anxieties about fertility, family, and society's interpretation of the public good, which tends to incorporate gender and race at a different register than the liberal underpinnings of the backlash thesis can appreciate. Indeed, I have given an alternative way of interpreting how people negotiate their expectations of the dominant norms that emerge from capitalist competition. Reproductive decisions are still contested moral terrain for reasons that are not reducible to cultural backwardness. For these reasons, norms of self-interest in the market do not always result in normalizing respect for bodily autonomy instead of womanly self-sacrifice. They can just as well result in the perception that one's exercise of reproductive agency is an assault on public finances or a pernicious pathology that is undermining society's moral fabric. One way of summarizing my opposing argument is that it is arbitrary to separate social attitudes from market imperatives, and it is an altogether modern problem that women are punished for failing to keep up the charade of voluntary exchange. To insist that conservative reaction is mainly sustained by feminist success, as opposed to the failures of feminism to confront capital, and to thereby meet the material needs of its constituency, is to insist on a gross distortion.

V. Making Comparisons in a Global Economy

In this article, I have argued for replacing the notion of a backlash as a frame for understanding resistance to reproductive rights. I have claimed that the neat story of patriarchal and white-supremacist backwardness rebelling against modern feminism and civil rights is not as straightforward as many assume. I have contended that resistance to reproductive rights meaningfully reflects the pressures of the social structure in which women currently live. Rather, the resistance and ideologies that accompany it are consistent with contradictory, gendered expectations of family and state. I argued further that these contradictory expectations have a class character and that a more systematic class analysis is needed to understand the contemporary political landscape regarding reproductive rights.

This essay focused on the United States, so I conclude by suggesting what my argument might contribute to feminist analyses of reproductive rights elsewhere. First, socialist feminists have already come a long way in developing a unitary theory of gender and class oppression. The state has played a relatively minor role in this framework thus far despite being a central issue. What I have contributed is a context-specific dissection of how people negotiate and normatively frame the matter of imposing institutional boundaries between the economy and the polity. I believe that one could also examine a different political logic in another context. Social democracies, even in their decline, will differ from liberal economies with proportionately small welfare states like the United States, and both will differ from capitalist societies with state-led development of industry and more authoritarian governance. The record on reproductive rights under capitalism is mixed and likely to stay that way, and it is moreover difficult to generalize due to the path-dependent nature of local institutional development.

What I suspect, however, is that there are useful comparisons to be made and some similarities to be drawn out. What one should expect is that more sustained challenges to the power of capital that increase a society's capacity to ameliorate important constraints on working-class families will have significant effects on its attitude toward reproductive rights. I think that it is uncoincidental that many social democracies have both less resistance to reproductive rights and have more robust social protections. Thus, feminists should develop a strong interest in public welfare conjointly with labor organizations as a specifically feminist raison d'être. My own view is that it is only such an alliance that can secure reproductive rights with a popular democratic mandate, rather than narrowly and juridically through the courts. The political right also fixates on abortion everywhere to develop a rhetoric of resistance to neoliberal capitalism that shores up the sanctity of the family as the foundation of society. Indeed, it seems to me that the practice of patching together diverse electoral coalitions by making abortion the centerpiece of a moral critique of society is something the political right has in common globally. The latter are not normally ideologies that favor solutions based both on strong labor market protections and a robust public sector. What I hope to contribute are some structural reasons (again, beyond apparent moral conviction) why these strategies may continue to be effective, given changing political constituencies and material conditions. Such comparisons are useful for conjunctural assessments of the political transformations that are currently underway and the strategies that social movements for gender equality need to meet the challenges that they face. Feminists can and should make themselves a part of a bone fide opposition to neoliberalism that undercuts the attractiveness of the right's project. Perhaps the U.S. case becomes a cautionary tale.