All Politics Are Reproductive Politics: Welfare, Immigration, Gay Marriage, Foreclosure

The collision of  two forces—increasing unpaid care burdens, and ever more need for wage labor—have conspired over the past forty years to radically reconfigure both families and political common sense in particularly racialized ways. In this project, Briggs argues that this issue has driven nearly every other significant policy debate in the United States since the 1970s: not just abortion and daycare, but feminism in general, welfare, immigration, gay marriage, and IVF. Welfare reform was a “who cares for the children” fight; gay marriage cases have been decided in terms of “the children”; the majority of immigrants to the U.S. are women, disproportionately doing care work; and IVF is about the necessity of delaying childbearing into one’s 30s in the U.S., when fertility begins to be reduced. Furthermore, this is by no means a white middle-class or U.S. problem. While being out of the labor force may seem like a privilege particularly of white U.S. suburbanites in the 1950s, both the care crunch and the need to work longer and longer days for shrinking wages have disproportionately affected working-class people, people of color, and a growing segments of the Third World. The ways individuals, households, and communities grind up against these issues accounts for a great deal, including why race, gender, and reproduction have been such central issues in the U.S. and beyond since at least the 1970s.