Marx, Malthus, and the Moral Economy of Reproduction

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.