Abstract
Birth Strike takes our understanding of the struggle for women’s reproductive rights beyond the realm of misogyny and culture wars into the realm of political economy. Author Jenny Brown, a former editor at Labor Notes and a longtime organizer for National Women’s Liberation, says that in our struggles to defend reproductive rights, “We have only vaguely sensed why the power structure wants to control our reproductive lives” (153). It is a struggle over the price of women’s reproductive labor, she says.
The book begins by citing the declining birth rate in the United States—currently at 1.76 for every two people. Elite thinkers, says Brown, fear a shrinking population, which means a shrinking economy, which is not good for business. However, their policy does not incentivize reproduction by making it easier. They just promote forced pregnancy by making birth control and abortions hard to get. If they need more future workers, why do not they pass paid family leave, universal health coverage, and free child care? The fact is that the high cost of raising kids on flat incomes is the main reason women are avoiding pregnancy in unprecedented numbers. The book has compelling testimonies of women who decide against having children because it is too difficult. Brown sees this reproduction slowdown as a de facto birth strike.
Other countries gave up forced pregnancy policies in favor of making it easier to have children, and Brown not only shows how out-of-step is the United States but also some model policies abroad like the social wage in some of Europe, which includes free child care, paid family leave and sick leave, paid vacations, pensions, and health care.
Brown provides a needed perspective on the period since the 1970s. Labor historians focus on the attack on men’s wages, union busting, and offshoring of jobs, but often fail to analyze the demise of the family wage and the influx of women into an engendered workforce. While millions of women took on the double burden, society did nothing to support us with even a pittance of a social wage. Instead, welfare reform dumped women into low-wage jobs just as employers were undercutting any working-class efforts to win gains. And now, elites are caught in a contradiction of their own making. Profit maximization gave rise to the birth strike so where will they get their future labor force? And forced reproduction, short of some Hand Maid’s Tale scenario, just is not enough.
Birth Strike puts class back in the discussion about women’s rights. It also goes beyond the economics of work and family to discuss race and how elites want the labor of people of color but fear their numbers, even resorting to forced sterilization. The same for immigrants. Could not they solve the low birth rate problem? Elites want their labor but do not want more people of color.
So how can this spontaneous birth strike become conscious with achievable demands? Brown says women do not recognize our own power. She says, “We need to stop thinking about birth control and abortion as just individual choices . . . and start thinking about them as a tool of political power that women, the childbearing workforce must control” (153). She recommends consciousness-raising groups like we had in the late 1960s to develop women’s class consciousness.
I have been recommending this book to union women I know. In this period when our reproductive rights and our union rights are under very serious attack, we need to step up and make sure our unions are with us in the battle to defend both. I do wish Brown had gone further to develop the strategy to win this birth strike. Since she did not, it is on all of us to help develop that strategy.