In this challenging article, the author marries the notion of reproduction, both biological and social, to new forms of political and popular racism in Europe wherein the family and breeding to keep the nation white and ‘native’ are now centre stage. Whilst certain women’s reproductive capacities are being incentivised for nationalist ends, this goes alongside a rollback in reproductive rights as well as a series of exclusions aimed at those marked as demographic threats – migrants, Muslims and, increasingly, LGBTQ people. She demonstrates how migrant women, who are vilified as breeders who could threaten the purity of the nation, are essential to maintain the traditional nuclear family under capitalism, through caring for the young and old, but simultaneously denied their rights as workers and mothers. The focus on reproduction is now a key dividing line in European racism; something that feminists and anti-racists should now address. This, she argues is more than a matter of intersectionality, but a new racist avatar which she terms reproductive racism.
The weekend of action, ‘Solidarity Knows No Borders’ took place in October 2020 and was organised by a coalition of groups including Migrants Organise, The Monitoring Group, Polish Migrants Organise for Change, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, Docs Not Cops. Watch a video of the vigil here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=1001204183638931&ref=watch_permalink.
2.
FeketeLiz, Europe’s Faultlines (London: Verso, 2017), p. 97.
GraffAgnieszkaKorolczukElżbieta, ‘“Worse than Communism and Nazism put together”: war on gender in Poland’, in KuharRomanPaternotteDavid, eds, Anti-gender Campaigns in Europe: mobilizing against equality (New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 175–93.
‘Tip of the iceberg: religious extremist funders against human rights for sexual and reproductive health in Europe 2009-2018’, European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, 15June2021, p. 72.
Whilst same-sex marriage was eventually approved, measures for alternative reproductive procedures and adoption for LGBTQ couples were denied. During the months the law was being signed, researcher Camille Robcis recalls the violence that France witnessed, including the death of 19-year-old Clement Meric who was beaten to death by skinheads close to a far-right group protesting the law, see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/gender-trouble-in-france/.
‘Tip of the iceberg: Religious extremist funders against human rights for sexual and reproductive health in Europe 2009-2018’, European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, June2021.
Gender policy researcher Bianka Vida notes, ‘poor women are disproportionately affected by budgetary cuts in reproductive health services; and rural women, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrant women may also find it more difficult to receive appropriate and timely sexual and reproductive health care’. See VidaBianka, ‘New waves of anti-sexual and reproductive health and rights strategies in the European union’, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters27, no. 2 (2019), pp. 13–16.
Under communism, Poland was the first country in Europe to legalise abortion beyond medical need in 1932; however, this changed in the 1990s due to conflict between the Catholic Church and state socialism.An ‘abortion compromise’ was put in place, whereby abortion is only permitted in cases of rape, incest, if the mother is at risk of dying or if the foetus is at serious risk. See https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/abortion-poland-law-international-womens-strike-labor.
KovátsEszterPõimMaari, eds, Gender as Symbolic Glue: the position and role of conservative and far Right parties in the anti-gender mobilizations in Europe (Budapest: Foundation for European Progressive Studies in Cooperation with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2015); GraffAgniezskaKapurRatnaWaltersSuzanna Danuta, eds, ‘Gender and the rise of the global Right’, Signs44, no. 3 (2019).
31.
KorolczukGraff, ‘“Worse than Communism and Nazism put together”’, p. 13.
Crisis narratives are easily mobilised by tapping into the precarity that the current neoliberal economy fosters, and redirecting it into a sense of impending demographic calamity. See LoftsdóttirKristen, ‘An alternative world: a perspective from the North on racism and migration’, Race & Class62, no. 4 (2021).
DaveyJacobEbnerJulia, The Great Replacement: the violent consequences of mainstreamed extremism (London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2019), p. 8.
36.
See KorolczukE.GraffA., ‘Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”: the anticolonial frame and the rise of illiberal populism’, Signs43, no. 4 (2018), pp. 797–821.
The fear of a ‘white genocide’ is a far-right conspiracy theory, popularised by white supremacist David Lane, which centres on a belief that the immigration of non-white people, falling white birth rates, and the promotion of multiculturalism are all part of a deliberate plot to destroy the ‘white race’.
For instance, a Daily Mail article headline states ‘Migrant baby boom means one in four infants now born in the UK has a mother who was born overseas and figure could reach one-in-three- by 2021’ (15 July 2015) and a Spectator headline asks ‘Why doesn’t David Attenborough blame Muslims for overpopulation?’ (18 September 2013). This sentiment trickles down into the racial harassment of young Muslims. In January 2019, a white man followed a group of Muslim schoolgirls in London, saying they are going to ‘breed like rats’ and calling for them to be sterilised by a Nazi sterilisation programme ‘so they can’t multiply’. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/muslim-schoolgirls-followed-man-video-footage-police-investigate-london-bow-a8750146.html.
44.
See VogelLise, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Leiden: Brill, 1983); BhattacharyaTithi, ed., Social Reproductive Theory: remapping class, recentering oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
45.
FraserNancy, ‘Contradictions of capital and care’, New Left Review100 (2016), p. 102.
46.
FedericiSilvia, ‘The reproduction of labour power in the global economy and the unfinished feminist revolution’, in AtzeniMaurizio, ed., Workers and Labour in a Globalized Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
47.
There is a much longer history in the Americas of the gendered and racialised expropriation of black women’s labour and bodies during slavery and beyond, explored by black feminist thinkers. See HartmanSaidiya, ‘The belly of the world: notes of black women’s labours’, Souls18, no. 1 (2016), pp. 166–73; Angela Davis, ‘Reflections on the Black woman’s role in the community of slaves’, The Black Scholar 3, no. 4, (1971), pp. 2–15.
48.
JokelaMerita, ‘Examining the role of institutions in shaping migrant reproductive labour’, in SavinettiNicol FoulkesRiekhoffAart-Jan, eds, Shaping and Re-shaping the Boundaries of Working Life (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2020), p. 79.
The Hartz laws in 2003–2004 introduced the ‘mini-jobbers’ employment scheme, which enabled workers to earn a maximum of 450 Euros per month without paying tax, and without employers needing to pay tax – a scheme widely criticised for trapping women into low-paid and marginal employment contracts, as working-hour limits were removed and the scheme forced many to work informally in order to supplement their pay. See ShireKaren, ‘Family supports and insecure work: the politics of household service employment in conservative welfare regimes’, Social Politics: international studies in gender, state and society22, no. 2 (2015), p. 204.
51.
Shire, ‘Family supports and insecure work’.
52.
Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal London, How the hostile environment creates sites without rights: evidence presented to the London Hearing of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on the violations with impunity on the rights of migrants and refugees (London: PPT steering group, 2019).
53.
The employment of migrant women even increases in times of recession, forming what Sara Farris calls ‘a regular army of labour’ that is consistently relied on for care work. Sara Farris, ‘Social reproduction and racialized surplus populations’, in OsbornePeter, et al., eds, Capitalism: concept, idea, image (London: CRMEP Books, 2019), p. 121.
54.
CastlesStephen, ‘The guestworker in Western Europe: an obituary’, International Migration Review20, no. 4 (1986), p. 769.
55.
SivanandanA., ‘Race class and the state: the black experience in Britain’, Race & Class17, no. 4 (1976).
56.
Domestic workers in the UK were stripped of two hard-won rights in 2012; the right to leave their employer for another one and the right to stay in the UK as workers on a visa leading to settlement. See How the hostile environment creates sites without rights, p. 75.
AndersonBridget, ‘Migration, immigration controls and the refashioning of precarious workers’, Work, Employment and Society24, no. 2 (2010), pp. 300–17.
Words spoken at a vigil held outside the Home Office, October 2020.
63.
The roots of the hostile environment can be traced back several decades, see The Embedding of State Hostility: a background paper to the Windrush scandal (London: Institute of Race Relations, 2018).
64.
NRPF applies to a wide range of migrants such as those whose permission to be in the UK is subject to a visa, including those joining spouses, visitors, workers, students and family members as well as asylum seekers and undocumented people.
The work done by black feminists in the US, who in 1994 coined the term reproductive justice to denote, ‘the right to have and not to have a child – the myriad of ways our rights to be mothers and parent our children are constantly threatened’ is instructive for looking at issues around reproduction holistically, beyond solely the right to choose. See Loretta J. Ross ‘Reproductive justice as intersectional feminist activism’, Souls19, no. 3 (2019), pp. 286–314.
