Natal protest: The politics of the birth strike

Abstract

A birth strike is a collective refusal to have children for political ends. It has been deployed by a wide array of political movements, from the resistance of Black people to plantation slavery to contemporary campaigns around climate change. Despite this, the tactic has received little attention from political theorists. Drawing on a range of perspectives – including empirical accounts of the birth strike, broader scholarship on the politics of strikes and Black feminist work on reproductive justice – this article addresses the challenges and potentialities of the birth strike as a mode of political resistance. To this end, I delineate three different forms of the birth strike: the Malthusian, which focuses on directly addressing overpopulation; the sacrificial, which emphasises the self-directed suffering of the strike to force a change in policy; and, the defiant, which involves refusing pronatalist demands to maintain or increase the population rate. The Malthusian and sacrificial forms should be avoided since the former undermines reproductive justice and the latter reinforces the patriarchal association between womanhood and motherhood. By contrast, I defend the defiant form because it forges a space where people can make autonomous decisions about childbirth.

The last decade witnessed an upsurge in climate activism. Extinction Rebellion has engaged in a programme of mass civil disobedience, students have walked out of their schools as part of the Fridays for Future movement, and activists have besieged fossil fuel infrastructure, including the Indigenous-led campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Alongside these familiar forms of protest, some environmentalists have adopted a surprising tactic: the birth strike. In 2019, Asian Canadian activist Emma Lim began the #NoFutureNoChildren campaign and the white British singer-songwriter Blythe Pepino began the BirthStrike group (McMullen and Dow, 2022; Sasser, 2024). Those involved in these campaigns pledged not to have children until decisive action on the climate crisis is taken by governments. The campaigners argue that it is not right to bring children into a world where they are likely to face wild weather, extreme temperatures and unprecedented floods. For Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, an activist involved in the BirthStrike campaign, the purpose of the strike was to raise awareness about the threat on the horizon: ‘We made clear that we, in fact, weren’t telling people whether they should or shouldn’t have children – only that there's a threat so ghastly, and so ignored by those in power, that we’re too scared to have any ourselves’ (Johannesson, 2022: 143).

As historians are beginning to uncover, the birth strike has a long history, with feminist resistance movements periodically employing the tactic to counter patriarchal forms of power. Enslaved Black people engaged in a covert campaign to resist coercive attempts by plantation owners to increase the birth rate, and hence the number of enslaved people they owned (Davis, 1972; Kaplan, 2021; Weinbaum, 2019). The campaign for women's suffrage in the early twentieth century added the birth strike to their repertoire of tactics, with some activists calling on women to refrain from having children until governments granted equal voting rights (Shew, 2023). Trade unionists, socialists and anarchists – particularly in Germany, France and the United States – advocated the birth strike in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, arguing that one way to disrupt capitalism is to deny it a future generation of workers (Offen, 2018; Richards, 2020).

Political theorists have largely ignored the birth strike. To a certain degree, this lack of attention is unsurprising. It is only recently that scholars in other disciplines have begun to explore the birth strike, whether unearthing its history in various protest movements or examining its role in contemporary climate campaigns. That said, there are some resonances between the birth strike and recent concerns in political theory. This is evident from the scholarly attention to the two terms, birth and strike, at stake here. Scholars of political disobedience have become increasingly interested in strikes more generally, whether that is hunger strikes or labour strikes, offering nuanced justifications for the refusal of food and the withdrawal of labour (Aitchison, 2022; Delmas, 2024; Gourevitch, 2018; Raekstad and Rossi, 2022). Birth is also a perennial matter of concern to political theorists, whether in the form of the call for reproductive justice from women of colour (Ross and Sollinger, 2017), debates about the moral right to bear children in the climate crisis (Coole, 2018) and feminist theorising on the phenomenological and political significance of birth itself (Söderbäck, 2019).

In this article, I bring the insights of this literature into dialogue with accounts of the birth strike to address the following questions: When is it most politically productive to employ the birth strike? What should be the aims and intentions of the birth strike? How should birth strikers conduct themselves? To answer these questions, I differentiate between three different forms of the birth strike. First, the Malthusian birth strike where the refusal to have children is understood to combat the danger posed by overpopulation and enact an alternative world where having no or few children is the norm. Second, the sacrificial birth strike where the refusal to have children is a contingent measure designed to force governments to change policy by emphasising the suffering inflicted by the action on its participants. Finally, the defiant birth strike where it involves a refusal to fulfil pronatalist demands from powerful institutions and prevailing cultural norms to maintain or increase the birth rate, particularly in conditions where birth is likely to be unsafe. I argue that the defiant birth strike is the most defensible form of the tactic. This is because, in contrast to the Malthusian and sacrificial forms, it avoids some of the distinctive political risks associated with the birth strike: that it will foster violations of reproductive rights and that it will reinforce the association between motherhood and womanhood. On this basis, it is argued that the birth strike is most productive when it is a response to a demand for a high birth rate, when it aims to generate an autonomous space for reproductive decision-making, and (if its aims are made public) it communicates this intention to potential strikers and bystanders.

To make this argument, I begin in the first section by exploring some of the distinctive features of the birth strike, then reflect on the Malthusian, sacrificial and defiant modes of the birth strike in the subsequent three sections, before finally outlining some broad conditions for maximising the political potentiality of the birth strike in the concluding section.

Before moving to this argument, three comments should be made. First, I take it as given that it is, at least under some circumstances, legitimate for people to have children. As such, I do not address the question of anti-natalism, or the position that it is always wrong to have children (on this debate, see Overall, 2012). Leaving aside the merits and demerits of this position, anti-natalism does not capture the position of most birth strikers. The latter are not generally against having children but rather refuse to have children in the world as it exists in the contemporary moment. Debates concerning anti-natalism are thus not directly relevant to the issue of the birth strike. Second, I generally refer to birth strikers in gender-neutral terms. Although women have often been the leaders of birth strike campaigns, and as such I occasionally refer to birth strikers as women, other people can become pregnant, such as transmen. Moreover, people who cannot become pregnant themselves may support the birth strike in other ways. Most directly, this may be by avoiding having biological children or providing birth control and abortion services. More indirectly, it may involve contributing to the development of forms of life that are not centred on biological reproduction, such as queer communities in which non-heteronormative relations are cultivated. Finally, in the following, I often refer to the refusal to have children. By this, I mean that birth strikers refrain from bringing new life into the world through pregnancy and birth. However, it should be acknowledged that there are other ways of having children, most obviously adoption, that are not directly affected by calls for a birth strike.

The birth strike as resistance

Before moving to the main body of the argument, it is first worth considering what kind of protest action the birth strike is. The birth strike, in simple terms, can be defined as the refusal to have children as part of a collective struggle to achieve certain political ends. Three salient aspects of this definition should be highlighted. By the refusal to have children, I mean that birth strikers make a conscious effort to avoid bringing new life into the world. They may not be successful in this aim (especially if reliable birth control and access to abortion services are absent) but they go to some lengths to avoid childbirth. A collective struggle implies that the birth strikers understand their action as one undertaken by a broader group of people. The refusal to have children, in this case, is driven by the desire, sometimes explicitly expressed and at other times inchoate, to participate in a wider struggle. Finally, the birth strike should, either implicitly or explicitly, aim to achieve political change, whether this is a shift in government policy, the assertion of autonomy or the enactment of a better world.

On the basis of this definition, the birth strike can be described, in broad terms, as a form of resistance, which Candice Delmas defines as ‘a multidimensional continuum of dissenting acts and practices, which includes lawful and unlawful acts (or “principled disobedience”), and expresses, broadly, an opposition and refusal to conform to the established institutions and norms, including cultural values, social practices, and laws’ (2018: 10). Now, as critics note, especially those committed to the concept of civil disobedience, the notion of resistance is somewhat vague (Scheuerman, 2018). Resistance includes a great number of political actions that are otherwise distinct from one another, with violent and non-violent action, lawful and unlawful protest, public and private acts all equally embraced by the concept. However, for analysing the birth strike, the broadness of the concept of resistance is useful. This is partly because, as we will see in the sections on the Malthusian, sacrificial and defiant birth strikes, the tactic takes several different forms, each of which share an affinity with different conceptualisations of resistive politics. I will progressively narrow down my understanding of the birth strike as the article proceeds, drawing on a range of perspectives on political disobedience.

Delmas's notion of resistance is also valuable because it captures some of the distinctive features of the birth strike. Most particularly, resistance offers a more propitious starting point than the notion of civil disobedience, at least as conceptualised in the Rawlsian tradition. On this understanding, civil disobedience is ‘a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law’ (Rawls, 1999: 320). Regardless of the value of Rawlsian civil disobedience in general terms (there are certainly reasons for questioning its account of protest), it fails to capture key components of the birth strike as a form of protest. Certainly, the birth strike is a conscientious act, in the sense that it is guided by moral and political convictions, and is generally non-violent, in the sense that it does not involve directly harming people. Yet, in crucial respects, the birth strike does not adhere to this definition of civil disobedience. Birth strikers may break the law, particularly in contexts where access to birth control and abortion services are highly constricted. However, in other cases, the birth strike remains within the law and instead defies social and cultural expectations, most particularly the widespread belief that womanhood is consubstantial with motherhood, the idea that having children is necessary for a fulfilled existence, or pronatal policies that incentivise the formation of nuclear families over other forms of community (all of which are discussed in greater detail below). As such, the normative issues associated with the birth strike are different from that of illegal forms of protest action. Whereas the latter rises the question of political obligation (namely, under what conditions is it justified to break the law), the former raises an alternative set of issues, particularly those associated with the right to reproductive autonomy. Given this, resistance, which encompasses a broader range of disobedient acts, better captures what is at stake in the birth strike.

Second, the birth strike is not necessarily public. Certainly, in many of the cases highlighted above, the birth strike is a public act, with organisations and activists communicating their intention to refrain from having children until certain political demands are met (whether that be voting rights or action on the climate crisis). However, in other cases, birth strikers either cannot or choose not to declare their actions, hence why resistance offers a better framework than civil disobedience for understanding it. For instance, enslaved Black people generally did not make public their refusal to have children for fear of retribution and due to lack of access to the means of communication (hence why historians have had to reconstruct their actions from sources written by bystanders). ¹ Moreover, given the femininity of birth and the masculinity of the public sphere, action centred on reproduction (as with other forms of feminist protest) has often not been understood as political (Pateman, 1989). As Jessica Banks (2023: 23) notes: ‘Birth is fragmented into billions of individualized pieces, privatized and understood in the context of families, not societies’. As a result, birth strikes are sometimes enacted, with people deciding not to have children for political reasons, but this action, because it is seen as private, fails to translate into the public realm. Many apparently individual decisions to refrain from having children – for example, motivated by the financial cost of raising a child, concerns about health complications or a desire to focus on other activities – have an underlying political content, expressing a sense of dissatisfaction with prevailing relations of reproduction.

Lucy Re-Bartlett, one of the key proponents of the birth strike in the women's suffrage movement in Britain, offers a useful way of thinking about this aspect of the birth strike. She described it as a ‘silent strike’, in the sense that many people, as indicated by data on ‘the increasing celibacy of women’, were refusing to have children but they were unable to talk about this decision in public (Re-Bartlett, 1912: 26). ² The silent nature of the birth strike is evident in the contemporary moment. For instance, empirical studies demonstrate that many young people are nervous about having children because of the possible effects of climate change (Dillarstone et al., 2023). While most of these people have not encountered the public campaigns described above, they are implicitly demanding action on the climate crisis through their reproductive acts. In a similar fashion, Jenny Brown (2019) suggests that declining birth rates across Western Europe, North America and East Asia can be understood as a hidden protest against neoliberalism. People are refusing to have children in contexts where social support has been progressively degraded, thus putting intolerable pressure on individuals and families to take almost full responsibility for childcare. So, in this article, I take a broad view of the birth strike, considering examples of both public and silent birth strikes.

The Malthusian birth strike

The birth strike is sometimes advocated by political activists concerned with the deleterious consequences of population growth. For instance, a current in the suffrage movement in the early twentieth century understood the birth strike not merely as a means of putting pressure on governments to extend voting rights but also as a means of limiting population growth, with an alliance between feminist campaigners and the British Malthusian League forming (Shew, 2023). In a similar fashion, some of the socialists and anarchists who advocated for the birth strike in the early twentieth century were influenced by Malthusian concerns, to the point where in France ‘anarchism and neo-Malthusianism’ were ‘nearly synonymous’, with the demand to disrupt the state and capital by limiting childbirth chiming with the demand to reduce the global population (Richards, 2020: 110).

The climate birth strike has also been articulated in Malthusian terms. The emergence of the green movement in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a strong neo-Malthusian tendency, as evidenced by the huge success of Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted that population growth would cause a catastrophic breakdown. This concern persists into the contemporary moment, with prominent environmentalists, such as David Attenborough (2020) and Bill McKibben (1999), suggesting that population growth must be curbed to address the climate crisis (Sasser, 2018). On this basis, some environmentalists call for a birth strike, encouraging people not to have children for environmental reasons. As Emma Olliff (2020), a birth striker, explains: ‘Our increasing population is putting pressure on the environment and if it keeps going the way it is, then we will destroy the earth’.

In this way, the Malthusian birth strike is a form of prefigurative politics. The latter refers to political actions that involve ‘the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now’ (Raekstad and Gradin, 2021: 10). Prefiguration, though generally associated with radical currents in politics (particularly anarchism) rather than the reactionary politics of Malthusianism, is centred on the idea that protest action, instead of or in addition to demanding changes from powerful agents, should embody the forms of change that it ultimately wants to achieve. In a similar fashion to other practitioners of prefigurative politics, Malthusian birth strikers be the change they want to see. By deciding not to have children, they directly address what they regard as one of the central causes of current social problems, population growth, as well as demonstrating the viability of a childfree existence, with strikers normalising the notion of having no or few children. ³

Yet, the idea that population growth is a key source of social and environmental problems is highly controversial. As Lorretta Ross (2017: 185–186) states, the right to have children, alongside the right not to have children, is a central pillar of reproductive justice, not least because this right has often been denied to oppressed people: ‘Population control measures, also called eugenics, […] sought to manage reproduction in communities of colour as well as among others, such as poor white people and mentally or physically disabled people’. Such policies are responsible for many violations of reproductive justice, including programmes of mandatory sterilisations and enforced abortions, ranging from the measures enacted in India during the Emergency Period in the 1970s (Wilson, 2018) to the forced sterilisations of people in migrant detention centres in the United States today (Flores, 2020). These programmes have disproportionately impacted women in the Global South and are rarely directed at privileged populations in the Global North (Hartmann, 2016; Vergès, 2017).

Now, it would be wrong to say that populationist advocates of the birth strike endorse these policies. There have been various attempts to reconcile reproductive rights and population control policies, with a general focus on incentivising rather than forcing people to have fewer children (Conly, 2016; Cripps, 2015). Advocates of the Malthusian birth strike also adopt this approach. They hope the birth strike will help to ‘spread information and educate people’ about the dangers of overpopulation, thus sparking a widespread voluntary refusal to have children (Olliff, 2020; see also Brunschweiger, 2019). However, as critics note, advocating for reduced birth rates for environmental reasons, even with these concessions to reproductive rights, risks reinforcing reproductive injustice (Ojeda et al., 2020; Sasser, 2018; Schultz, 2021). While the intention of the Malthusian birth strike may not be eugenic, there is a danger that its effects will be. Just as there is ‘racism without racists’, where policies that are not explicitly racist bolster racial inequalities, there is eugenics without eugenicists (Bonilla-Silva, 2014: 4). The structural nature of contemporary inequalities – whether stemming from capitalism, racism, colonialism or ableism – means that measures aimed at reducing the birth rate are likely to result in increased pressure on working class people, women of colour and disabled people to not have children. The Malthusian birth strike is no exception to this, with the demand for people to not have children for populationist reasons reinforcing ‘historically deeply rooted racist and classist attribution of this excess to “others”’ (Schultz, 2021: 486).

Moreover, one of the features of prefigurative political formations is that small-scale experiments in alternative ways of living are not ends in themselves but rather a means to transform the world. The same is true of the Malthusian birth strike. In demonstrating that a childfree existence is both necessary and desirable, it implies that other people who care about the environment and wish to live a fulfilled life should follow the example of the birth strikers. However, the generalised desirability of the forms of life advocated by birth strikers is questionable. In particular, people subject to unjust restrictions on their capacity to reproduce, especially those targeted by the violent policies highlighted above, are unlikely to affirm the utopian vision advanced by Malthusian environmentalists. As a group of Black and women of colour feminists write: ‘The birth of our children of color is a cause for celebration, because, in the words of Audre Lorde, “We weren’t meant to survive”’ (Ross et al., 2017: 24). Even if population growth were accepted as a major cause of environmental destruction, the desirability of having children might be affirmed for other reasons – including economic survival, cultural preservation or resistance against population control policies.

Finally, the Malthusian birth strike also limits the potentiality of the tactic itself. Rather than being a political tool that can be utilised to achieve a variety of different political ends, it suggests that its primary purpose is to restrict population growth. This is a problem because, as noted above and elaborated below, the birth strike has been utilised to make demands that are not directly concerned with population size. Furthermore, by tying means and ends too closely together, the Malthusian birth strike weds the tactic to a questionable empirical analysis: that contemporary social and political problems result from overpopulation. For instance, there is little evidence to suggest that population growth, in and of itself, is a major cause of the climate crisis (Hartmann, 2016). More than that, it also results in a limiting account of the drivers of climate change, suggesting that it is individual decisions to have children, especially by already marginalised people, that are at the core of the crisis rather than structural forces of capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy (Ojeda et al., 2020). If it is the case that population is of little importance to the climate crisis, then the Malthusian birth strike loses its salience. It becomes largely pointless to fight for a reduced birth rate if this is not, in fact, the cause of current problems.

The sacrificial birth strike

One does not need to accept Malthusian concerns about overpopulation to advocate for a birth strike. There are other instances where the birth strike has been deployed to secure political ends that are not directly related to population size. For instance, some suffragists proposed the birth strike as a tool in the fight for women's voting rights. They called on people to avoid having children until voting rights were granted, using the birth strike to bolster other campaigning tactics, such as protest marches and hunger strikes (Shew, 2023). Re-Bartlett (1912: 25), giving voice to a silent birth striker, puts this point as follows: ‘I will know no man, and bear no child, until this apathy be broken through – these wrongs be righted!’ A similar dynamic is present in recent environmentalist campaigns, including BirthStrike in the United Kingdom and #NoFutureNoChildren in Canada. These campaigns deliberately eschewed the populationist concerns of Malthusian environmentalists (McMullen and Dow, 2022). They made it clear that they do not regard overpopulation as a central driver of climate change and instead use the birth strike to put pressure on governments to properly respond to the crisis.

This form of the birth strike, in which it is concatenated with a demand for powerful agents to change policy, differs in key respects from the Malthusian form discussed above. In fact, it has a greater affinity with other forms of strike action, including labour strikes and hunger strikes. Two points can be made here. First, like other forms of strike action, the birth strike in this instance is provisional and temporary rather than permanent and enduring. If the strike is successful in achieving its goals – for instance, voting rights for women are granted or action on the climate crisis is taken – then the strike will be called off. To quote Re-Bartlett (1912: 26), it represents ‘only a “strike” – a temporary protest – an appeal’. There is thus no inherent connection between the means and the end; the birth strike is instead a means to an end. So, just as workers may return to work having won their demands for better pay and conditions in a labour strike, the birth strikers may consider having children in the future if their demands are met. There is nothing desirable about the condition of strike action, but it may be necessary in some circumstances to advance political causes.

Second, the birth strike in this form often involves an element of coercion. In common with other forms of political disobedience, ranging from labour strikes to blockades and occupations, it does not simply aim to persuade powerful agents to change their policy but also to force them to act in a way that they might not otherwise do (Moraro, 2019). For instance, trade union action, while sometimes concerned with attempting to persuade employers to increase wages, aims to force them to do so by imposing economic costs – namely, through the cessation of production (Gourevitch, 2018). In an important sense, the birth strike is also coercive. To make this point, an analogy with another form of embodied political action is productive: the hunger strike. The latter, as scholars have highlighted, involves a specific form of coercion (Aitchison, 2022; Delmas, 2024). While the primary victim of the hunger strike is the striker themselves rather than the actor to whom their demands are addressed, the latter is positioned as responsible for the suffering of the former. The devastating health consequences of hunger strikes for its participants could be averted if the policy is changed, such that the strike could be stopped at any time by a powerful agent meeting its demands. The birth strike involves a similar form of coercion. Those participating in the strike claim that they are being forced to sacrifice an important life experience, the birth of a child, by the failures of others. As one activist with BirthStrike asserted:

I’m gutted to not be able to start my family, and I resent that our self-destruction and planetary destruction all for greed and ‘economic growth’ has stopped me from doing this… My decision not to have a child I truly feel is a necessity not a choice (quoted in MTV News, 2019).

In other words, they are inflicting a form of suffering on themselves, which could have serious long-term consequences in terms of their mental well-being, to put pressure on governments to change policy. It is for this reason that Re-Bartlett (1912: 24–25) insists that there is an element of militancy to the birth strike, suggesting that ‘the “madness” which has led to window-breaking’, one form of property destruction used by suffragettes, has ‘many other expressions’, including the refusal to have children.

Coercion is a controversial topic in the literature on civil disobedience (Livingston, 2021). Some defences of political resistance claim that it should only aim to persuade but never coerce, since persuasion respects the autonomy of others while coercion violates it (Brownlee, 2012; Rawls, 1999). However, radical accounts of political disobedience – whether emerging from Marxist, republican or democratic perspectives, for all their differences – posit that coercion is often an important means by which structurally disadvantaged groups assert political agency (Aitchison, 2018; Delmas, 2024; Gourevitch, 2018; Markovits, 2005). If coercion is deemed unacceptable, then one of the ‘weapons of the weak’, a political tool that is of particular value to oppressed peoples, is lost (Scott, 1985). From this perspective, coercive tactics are justified in certain circumstances, including: when a group can only advance its interests by using force against another, as in the case of industrial disputes (Gourevitch, 2018); a group's capacity for political resistance is very limited, as in the case of incarcerated people engaging in hunger strikes (Delmas, 2024); and, non-coercive tactics have been exhausted and there are few other ways of influencing policy (Aitchison, 2018; Fung, 2005). It is not my task to evaluate these conditions for engaging in coercive forms of protest (which may themselves risk limiting the scope of political resistance). I merely want to emphasise that, for those who are concerned about the issue of coercion, the birth strike presents no particular difficulties. In circumstances where other forms of coercive resistance are justified, then so is the birth strike. Indeed, the two examples above meet these requirements, with the suffrage movement operating in circumstances where women's democratic rights were severely restricted and climate activists operating in circumstances where standard democratic procedures have consistently failed to address the crisis.

While the concern about coercion does not necessarily pose specific challenges to the birth strike, there are other worries. A key concern is about the particular nature of the sacrifice involved in the birth strike. Many forms of political resistance involve some form of sacrifice. Sacrifice is an important means of affirming the integrity and sincerity of activists, with the willingness to suffer key to demonstrating their loyalty to the cause and a broader sense of conviction. As William E. Scheuerman (2018: 17, emphasis in original) comments: ‘Willingness to sacrifice and suffer, even in the face of injustice, demonstrated one's moral sincerity and jolted those complicit in evil into reconsidering their positions’. In many cases, the sacrifices borne by activists are uncontroversial. Very few would regard losing income in the case of a labour strike, being charged and convicted in the case of civil disobedience and enduring privation and pain in the case of hunger strikes as desirable. However, matters are less clear in the case of the birth strike. Many would contest the idea that having children is necessary for a fulfilled life – including those who are unable to have children and those who have no wish to have children. For the latter, the refusal to have children does not represent a sacrifice.

More significantly, the birth strike, in presenting itself as a sacrifice, risks reinforcing gendered expectations about the relationship between womanhood and childbirth. As feminist and queer theorists have long suggested, there is a pervasive cultural expectation that biological reproduction is at the core of what it is to be a woman; the purpose and function of women are restricted to that of childbirth (DiQuinzio, 1999; Tuana, 1994) This produces what queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004: 3) famously called ‘reproductive futurism’, where the very ability to imagine the future is dependent on the patriarchal and heteronormative ideal of a man and woman producing the next generation. The sacrifice involved in the birth strike, of not having children, reinforces this hegemonic vision of the world; it suggests that the activists are giving up something fundamental about themselves, namely childbirth, to force a change in policy. In contesting one form of power, whether that be unequal voting rights or climate inaction, it may bolster other relations of exclusion by rendering invisible alternative forms of existence (particularly those enacted in feminist and queer communities) that are not predicated on biological reproduction.

The defiant birth strike

Both the Malthusian and the coercive forms of the birth strike suffer from limitations. However, a more promising mode is that of defiance. This occurs where the birth strike is employed to resist demands on people to maintain or increase the population. Pronatalism, which socialist feminist Martha E. Giménez (2019, 162) defines as ‘the existence of structural and ideological pressures resulting in socially prescribed parenthood as a precondition for all adult roles’, is particularly important here (see also Blake, 1974). Certainly, not all social, cultural or political measures related to the birth rate are pronatalist; they are often oriented toward preventing certain people from reproducing. Nevertheless, pronatalism is an insistent presence in many contexts and it is expressed in various ways. Politically speaking, as Michel Foucault's (1979) account of biopolitics highlights, the birth rate is not an uncontrollable process, something that is beyond the purview of governance. Biopolitics includes a plethora of pronatalist policies – from financial incentives for parents to restrictions on birth control – that encourage people, more or less coercively, to have children and thus maintain or increase the birth rate. These policies are pursued for many reasons, with aims including bolstering military power, increasing the working-age population and fulfilling nationalist fantasies of strength. Culturally speaking, as suggested above, dominant conceptions of womanhood are closely tied to biological reproduction, such that there are strong pressures encouraging people to have children to fulfil certain cultural norms (DiQuinzio, 1999; Edelman, 2004; Tuana, 1994). Finally, economically speaking, there is a close relationship between capitalism and pronatalism, with unpaid domestic labour, including childbirth and childrearing, the necessary precondition for the continued existence of a proletarian workforce: ‘Women are segregated in the home as reproducers of the present and future generation of workers’ (Giménez, 2019, 162). In this way, there are a range of forces – including political, cultural and economic (to name just a few) – that prevent the radical reduction of the birth rate and work to either maintain or increase it.

As Black feminists have highlighted, the plantations of the Americas are especially important here (Kaplan, 2021; Vergès, 2017; Weinbaum, 2019). Plantation owners had an interest in increasing the enslaved population, something which could be achieved either by buying more enslaved people or forcing those already enslaved to have children. Particularly once the slave trade became illegal, measures were enacted to foster population growth amongst Black enslaved people (Schwartz, 2006). In some contexts, this involved incentivising Black women to have more children. For example, mothers of six or more children on the Caribbean island of Tobago were exempt from field work from 1798 onwards (Reddock, 1996). It also involved the institutionalisation of sexual assault, with plantation owners routinely abusing enslaved women, partly with a view to increasing the Black population (Kaplan, 2021; Weinbaum, 2019). However, as Angela Davis (1972) highlighted in a pioneering article, these measures were contested by Black women. Through the illicit use of contraceptives and abortion – and occasionally, as famously dramatized in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), infanticide – Black people engaged in a birth strike. They developed ‘an antipathy to child-bearing’ and refused ‘to bring children into a life of slavery as an act of resistance’ (Reddock, 1996: 14). Enslaved women developed an ‘anti-motherhood attitude as a form of resistance to the slave system’ and ‘continued a kind of birth strike till about the middle of the nineteenth century’ (Mies, 1986: 91).

The forms of control instituted on the plantation were, of course, extreme. Nevertheless, childbirth is encouraged in many other contexts. Pronatalism is often hidden, with ingrained processes of biopolitical governance, heteronormative practices and capitalist relations ensuring the people continue to engage in childbirth. However, there are historical moments when the birth rate becomes an object of explicit concern. For instance, the suffragist use of the birth strike in the early twentieth century took place in the context of a demographic crisis in many European countries (Shew, 2023). Concerns about the birth rate and military conflict were closely entwined, with many governments regarding the size of their population as key to their chances of success in warfare. Suffragists deemed the birth rate a key point of leverage; the refusal to give birth confounded state populationist policies. There are similar worries about the birth rate, particularly in the United States, Europe and East Asia, in the contemporary moment (Brown, 2019). As socialists and anarchists predicted over a century ago, the decline of birth rates in these countries, the fact that it is falling below the replacement rate, may trigger a crisis of capitalism in the future. Defenders of capitalism, alongside far-right conspiracists concerned about the so-called ‘great replacement’ (the idea that white populations will cease to be the majority in the Global North), have raised the alarm about declining birth rates (Bricker and Ibbitson, 2019; Feola, 2021). This has resulted in the introduction of pronatalist policies in some countries, with women rewarded financially for having more children in Hungary, Russia and Poland (Cook et al., 2023). In some cases, pronatalist policies involve the removal of access to birth control, sexual education and abortion services, something especially evident in the United States and Poland (Brown, 2019). Yet, as Brown (2019) suggests, a birth strike has emerged in the face of these policies. People are refusing the demand to have more children. As one protest banner in South Korea stated, where 65% of young women do not plan to have children despite attempts by the government to incentivise childbirth, there is a refusal to become ‘baby-making machines’ (Jung, 2023).

The defiant birth strike, which involves the refusal of pressure to maintain or increase the birth rate, is centrally concerned with reproductive autonomy. This is expressed in two ways. First, it asserts ‘the right not to have children’ (Ross et al., 2017: 14, emphasis in original). By defying the demand of authorities for the production of children, the birth striker demonstrates their agency both to themselves and others. The birth strike limits controls on reproductive activities and forges a space where people can make their own decisions about childbirth. Second, the birth strike also asserts ‘the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments’ (Ross et al., 2017: 14, emphasis in original). The defiant birth strike expresses the worry that the primary interest of pronatalist policies and norms is to sustain or raise the birth rate; the first priority is the production of children. All other concerns – particularly, reproductive health (e.g., deaths in childbirth) and social services for parents – are thus secondary. More broadly, as the climate birth strikers highlight, people are encouraged to bring more children into a world that, due to government inaction on ecological issues, may prove highly dangerous. ⁴

Hannah Arendt's notion of natality, which has become a touchstone in feminist philosophies of birth, is one productive means of approaching the defiant birth strike (Söderbäck, 2019). While Arendt's work does not offer the last word on reproductive politics, a detour through her account of natality is a useful first step for elaborating the theoretical stakes of refusing birth. For Arendt (1958: 204), the birth of a child represents the ‘new beginning’ that is crucial to political action. Just as birth interrupts the familiar cycles of life by bringing new existence into the world, political action is dependent on humanity's capacity for the unexpected: ‘Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new’ (Arendt, 1972: 179). The relationship between biological birth and political action is not merely metaphorical; the two are closely entwined, inflecting and influencing one another (Birmingham, 2006). As Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (2018: 176, emphasis in original) put it in their incisive reading of Arendt, ‘the event of natality that is integral to political action […] is dependent upon ensuring that women's inter-relational agency with regard to the first order of birth is acknowledged and preserved’. That is to say, ‘any form of forced birth is a kind of “making live” that amounts to a perversion of the event of natality’ (Diprose and Ziarek, 2018: 184, emphasis in original). Regimes of birth control thus pose a threat to political action; they risk turning birth into something regulated, an activity that lacks the capacity for newness and the unexpected (Vatter, 2006).

At first glance, it might seem that Arendt's notion of natality stands at some distance from the defiant birth strike. Whereas the former places the event of birth at the centre of politics, the latter involves the denial of birth. Yet, in the context of pronatalism, a relationship between the defiant birth strike and natality emerges. The birth strike asserts the autonomy of birth by disrupting the regulated processes and norms through which the birth rate is maintained; it throws a spanner into the works, functioning as a form of sabotage. In the process of withdrawing their reproductive labour, birth strikers render contingent the connection between the demand for a certain birth rate and its fulfilment. Rather than something inevitable, this demand becomes hollow, with the failure of the birth strikers to respond demonstrating their capacity for reproductive autonomy. The preconditions for novelty in politics, namely self-determination in the reproductive realm, are generated by the defiant birth strike, such that it becomes a means of counteracting the incursion of biopolitical processes into the arena of natality. ⁵ At times, this defiance is explicit, as when strikers refuse to engage in government policies that are designed to increase the population. At other times, it is implicit, involving the contestation of pervasive cultural norms and economic processes that make childbirth appear the only possibility for many people. In either case, the assertion of autonomy requires a radical reconstruction of the prevailing structures of contemporary society, with the defiant birth strike positing, however inchoately, an alternative world where pronatalism has been overcome.

Understood in this fashion, the defiant birth strike has some advantages over the Malthusian and sacrificial forms of the birth strike. At first glance, there are some similarities between the birth strike as defiance and the birth strike as a means to counter population growth. Namely, both involve an element of prefigurative politics. In refusing birth, the strikers are, in some sense, prefiguring the forms of autonomy that would be present in a society of reproductive justice. Indeed, there is both a negative and positive side to the defiant birth strike. Negatively speaking, it aims to disrupt the demand to maintain or increase the birth rate. Positively speaking, it opens new spaces for reproductive autonomy, forging the basis for utopian experiments (particularly, queer communities) where biological reproduction is decentred and reconfigured (Muñoz, 2009). For instance, in the case of the birth strike by enslaved Black women, a link can be posited between the birth strike and maroon communities. The negative act of refusing birth helped to establish the autonomy and confidence required to build a new society, with alternative relations of reproduction, beyond the plantation (Roberts, 2015).

However, despite a shared use of prefigurative politics, there is a crucial difference between the defiant and Malthusian birth strikes. The aim of the defiant birth strike is not for people to have fewer children but for people to have autonomy over their reproductive decisions. The purpose of the strike is to gain this autonomy in contexts where there are powerful forces requiring people to meet pronatalist demands for population maintenance or growth. Autonomy is prefigured but the exact form this might take (which could include either having or not having children) is not. Under different conditions, where pronatalist demands are absent, the strikers might act differently. The aim of the defiant birth strike is thus not to prescribe an ideal number of children that should be produced but rather for childbirth to ‘be considered one among other options rather than the main option, the focal point determining the range of other possible options for women’ (Giménez, 2019: 184–85, emphasis in original). In this way, the defiant birth strike avoids the worrying association between the tactic and reproductive injustice evident in the Malthusian form.

It also has advantages over the sacrificial mode of the birth strike. The latter, in suggesting that people make a great sacrifice in delaying or avoiding childbirth, risks reinforcing the association between womanhood and motherhood. However, this narrative is often propagated by those who wish to control reproductive activity, with the idea that women have an inherent drive to childbirth used to falsely justify pronatalist policies. The birth strike, in rejecting these pronatalist policies, also destabilises the relationship between motherhood and childbirth. It is social forces, rather than the innate desire of women, that impel childbirth, including government policies, capitalist demands for labour and hegemonic forms of gender relations. In this context, the defiant birth strike, with its refusal of reproduction, highlights the contingency of the relationship between womanhood and childbirth, thus opening the possibility for different forms of life that depart from heteronormative and patriarchal expectations. The birth strike resembles what Raffaele Laudani (2013) calls destituent power insofar that it involves a refusal to engage with the demands of existing institutions, practices and norms with a view to weakening their authority and forging new spaces of autonomy.

Defending the birth strike

In this final section, I draw together the insights of my account of the different modes of the birth strike to offer some broad reflections on when and how the tactic should be used by activists. Specifically, my concern is to discern some conditions that maximise the distinctive strengths of the tactic, namely the assertion of reproductive autonomy, while avoiding its distinctive weaknesses, namely a focus on overpopulation and identification of womanhood with motherhood. On this basis, I propose three conditions for a politically productive form of the birth strike. In terms of the cause of the birth strike, it should be a response to pronatalist political, economic or cultural demands to either maintain or increase the birth rate. That is, it should be an attempt to defy broader structures of power that encourage people, more or less coercively, to have more children than they might do otherwise and make this a precondition for full participation in society. In terms of the conduct of the birth strike, when the aims of the birth strike are communicated, which is not in every case, a clear attempt should be made to disassociate the strike from Malthusian policies of population reduction and the notion that not having children is a great sacrifice, since the former encourages violations of reproductive justice and the latter risks reducing womanhood to motherhood. Finally, in terms of the consequences of the birth strike, it should aim to expand reproductive autonomy, helping to secure a world where people can make their own decisions about childbirth and parent in safe and secure conditions.

A few comments should be made about these conditions. The first point, regarding the causes of the birth strike, is especially important. As we have seen, one danger of the birth strike is false universalism. That is, it is posited as a tactic that can be deployed by everybody everywhere, either because of a general need to reduce the global population or to advance a wide range of political goals. By contrast, the causal requirement, that the birth strike responds to attempts to maintain or increase the birth rate, highlights the specificity of the action: it is productively deployed in certain circumstances and not in others. Significantly, this prevents the birth strike from being addressed to people who, either historically or contemporarily, are subject to attempts to reduce their birth rate. There is no expectation that people subject to these forms of reproductive injustice, particularly racialised and colonised populations, should adopt the birth strike since it would fail to effectively contest the particular forms of power they are subject to. Indeed, in these circumstances, activist attempts to increase the birth rate and the framing of childbirth as an act of resistance are appropriate. For instance, in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian activists smuggle sperm from political prisoners in Israeli prisons denied conjugal visits to allow their wives to undergo IVF treatment, with this embodied form of resistance asserting reproductive autonomy in conditions of colonial domination (Rexer, 2023).

This first condition suggests that the birth strike should be predicated on a careful analysis of reproductive injustice in particular political and social contexts. In simple terms, the birth strike can be effectively deployed in circumstances where reproductive autonomy is violated by attempts to maintain or increase the birth rate but it is politically impotent in circumstances where it is violated by attempts to decrease the birth rate. However, it should be stressed that, given the multiple and diverse pressures on reproduction, applying this principle is unlikely to be straightforward. This is clear in particular national contexts. For example, in the United States, state policy on reproduction appears to encourage it in some cases (through restrictions on access to abortions) while denying it in others (the long history of sterilising Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour). For particular groups, there are often contradictory pressures. The intersecting nature of oppression may mean that some people are simultaneously encouraged and discouraged from giving birth. In the case of working-class Black people, the capitalistic drive to reproduce the working class may come into conflict with the racializing drive to reduce the non-white population. All of this is to say that the decision to employ the birth strike involves negotiating a range of pressures, such that activists need to assess the particular play of forces in specific political contexts, paying attention to the diverse experiences of reproductive injustice when determining both the targets of the strike and its likely participants.

A further concern can be raised here. This condition, that the birth strike is best deployed in situations where there are attempts to maintain or increase the birth rate, could be seen to restrict the tactic to matters of reproductive politics. As noted above, an advantage of the sacrificial birth strike is that it avoids this limitation: the birth strike is a tactic that can be deployed for a diverse range of political ends. Yet, this is not an unduly limiting stipulation for two reasons. First, as Laura Briggs (2017: 18) notes, ‘all politics are reproductive politics’ in the sense that it is difficult to broach any particular political issue without considering its relationship with questions of reproduction. For instance, as ecofeminists highlight, there is a close connection between the ecological crisis and reproductive labour, with both nature and childbirth posited as a resource that can be exploited for economic gain (Salleh, 1995). Given this, my account offers grounds for the climate birth strike. Second, the causal requirement does not overly limit the tactic because it describes the conditions under which the birth strike is likely to be effectively deployed. As the suffragists recognised, the political leverage of the birth strike is closely related to broader demands for a high birth rate. A birth strike in other conditions – for example, where the government is actively trying to reduce the birth rate – is unlikely to achieve its aims.

I should also clarify the second point, regarding the need for birth strikers to dissociate their campaigns from Malthusian and sacrificial narratives of the birth strike. It should be stressed that this is only necessary where those taking part in the birth strike publicly declare their intentions. In many cases, this requirement may not be necessary because the birth strikers either cannot or choose not to articulate their aims. However, in cases where a public statement of intent is issued, care should be taken to disassociate the defiant birth strike from the Malthusian and sacrificial forms of the tactic. This is because birth strikes are likely to be misinterpreted in Malthusian or sacrificial terms. Given the power of the latter discourses within the public sphere, birth strikers do not only need to declare their positive aims but also demonstrate how their actions differ from other, less defensible forms of the tactic. The strength of Malthusian narratives means that those employing the tactic might inadvertently reinforce this perspective, with its harmful consequences for the reproductive autonomy of oppressed groups (especially racialised and colonised people). In the same way, the fact that childbirth is widely understood as consubstantial with womanhood means there is a danger that the birth strike will buttress this connection, thus promoting heteronormative ideals and restricting space for queer existence. Now, it should be stressed that this is not a universal or transhistorical requirement. It is possible to imagine the birth strike occurring in contexts where it is unlikely to be misunderstood in populationist or heteropatriarchal terms. However, in the contemporary world, this condition is important. It is a crucial means of avoiding the damaging consequences that can be reasonably anticipated from employing the birth strike.

That said, even despite the best attempts of its participants, the birth strike may continue to be misinterpreted. This was the case with the BirthStrike campaign in the United Kingdom. The leaders of the campaign consistently explained that the purpose of their action was not to reduce the size of the population (McMullen and Dow, 2022). However, they found that their interlocutors were reluctant to engage with their action on these terms, with media interviewers, potential supporters and other climate activists often understanding their position as a Malthusian one: ‘The population argument was there, waiting for us in every conversation; every pitched article and journalist request carried with it a whiff of “there's too many of us”’ (Johannesson, 2022: 143). Two lessons can be drawn from this. On the one hand, activists may find that the discursive field is structured in such a way that it is impossible to avoid misinterpretation. In these contexts, it may be strategically prudent to abandon the campaign and adopt different tactics. Indeed, BirthStrike folded after its leaders concluded that it was impossible to continue the campaign without reinforcing Malthusian forms of environmentalism (McMullen and Dow, 2022). On the other hand, the birth strike imposes obligations on third parties who engage with it. They should strive to understand the birth strike on its own terms, even if they disagree with the tactic, rather than projecting their own interpretation of the action onto the participants. This may involve, where public statements are issued, carefully engaging with the intentions of the activists and, where they are not, offering a plausible reading of the action based on the broader context in which it occurs. In the case of the latter, historians studying the birth strike of Black enslaved people offer an instructive example. They have looked at the broader circumstances of slave resistance and read documents produced by powerful agents (such as plantation owners) ‘against the grain’ to reconstruct the causes, conduct and consequences of the birth strike (Davis, 1972; Reddock, 1996).

A few comments on the final condition, that the birth strike should aim to increase reproductive autonomy, should also be made. This condition is important because it provides grounds for solidarity between birth strike activists and other campaigners for reproductive justice. As I have emphasised throughout this article, only people subject to pronatalist pressure to maintain or increase the birth rate are likely to partake in a birth strike. More than that, it is inappropriate, as in the Malthusian birth strike, to propose it as a global tactic, because it is likely to be addressed to those who are not subject to this pressure. A risk here is that the defiant birth strike might appear too exclusive; it aims to mobilise some people and not others. The emphasis on reproductive autonomy, however, cuts against this exclusion. It places the birth strike in a continuum of resistive acts that are focused on contesting reproductive injustice. Such resistance may take different forms – and include attempts by people to increase the birth rate, as in the case of the Palestinian activists mentioned above – but they are all concerned with asserting reproductive autonomy in the face of restrictive practices and norms, whether these be pronatalist or anti-natalist. So, while the subject of the defiant birth strike may privilege some over others, it contributes to a broader culture of resistance that includes the vast majority of people who are subject to unjust controls on their reproductive autonomy. ⁶

Conclusion

The birth strike is a subterranean tactic of political resistance. Although often unrecognized as a political act, the refusal to have children can have important political consequences, both positive and negative. In outlining the different modalities of the tactic, I have offered a framework for reflecting on the politics of the birth strike. At its core, a birth strike should be targeted at agents or structures – including state power, economic processes or cultural norms – that are responsible for pronatalist measures aimed at maintaining or increasing the birth rate. Negatively speaking, the birth strike as a form of defiance avoids the major political dangers associated with the tactic, namely that it will reinforce reproductive injustice by encouraging Malthusian policies aimed at curtailing the birth rate and bolstering narratives that reduce womanhood to motherhood. Positively speaking, the defiant birth strike is oriented toward forging a space of reproductive autonomy, with resistance against pronatalist measures providing a basis for people to make their own decisions about childbirth. In Arendtian terms, the refusal of birth is an act of natality insofar that it involves an unexpected and troubling form of disobedience. In this manner, childbirth is politicised. Rather than an act based solely on the decisions of already autonomous subjects, it is a site of struggle, with the birth strike a tool to contest pervasive and unjust constrictions on reproduction.