Join CRFR and the University of Stirling as we welcome Professor Liz Beddoe (Auckland), Dr Laura Sochas (Edinburgh) and Dr Lucy Lowe (Edinburgh) to speak on reproductive justice. The event will be chaired by Dr Ariane Critchley (Stirling).

Agenda:

12:30 – 12:40: Welcome

12:40 – 12:50: Austerity as reproductive injustice: Did local government spending cuts unequally impact births? (Laura Sochas)

12:50 – 13:10: Migrant Justice is Reproductive Justice: Maternity, Migration, and Asylum in Scotland (Lucy Lowe)

13:10 – 13:40: Abolition and reproductive justice: Imagine a world where decisions about your own body were not regulated? (Liz Beddoe)

Austerity as reproductive injustice: Did local government spending cuts unequally impact births?

Large local government spending cuts in England, spanning over a decade of austerity politics, have severely restricted the universal services and public goods that shape parenting environments. Drawing on the Reproductive Justice framework, we ask whether restricting the right to parent in safe and healthy environments impinged on the right to have children. To do so, we introduce a new quantitative approach for “thinking with” Reproductive Justice. Using nationally representative UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) data and a within-between random effects model, we analyse whether local government spending cuts were associated with intersectional inequalities in childbearing over the 2010-2020 period. We find that local government spending cuts significantly decreased the probability of having a(nother) birth for women in the poorest households, by 9.1%, but not for women in the middle or richest households. Further, racially minoritised women across income categories were much more likely to live in local authorities that suffered substantial cuts. Although austerity policies may not have directly restricted people’s biological capacity to conceive, our findings show that local government austerity cuts unequally restricted the right to have children.

Laura Sochas is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow/Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Policy at Edinburgh. She is leading a project “Policing Reproduction via Migration and Family Policies: Stress, Stigma & Health”, exploring how austerity and social policies in Europe affect parents’ rights to have children and to parent with dignity, and how this affects their health, formulating a quantitative approach to Reproductive Justice.

Migrant Justice is Reproductive Justice: Maternity, Migration, and Asylum in Scotland

UK immigration and asylum legislation and policies foster environments of isolation and precarity, while framing people who cross borders as a pathology to be controlled. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrant women in Glasgow, Scotland, this paper explores how this hostile environment shapes experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Focusing on interlocutors’ interactions with NHS staff and social services, it examines how notions of risk are embedded in gendered and racialised perceptions of maternal bodies, and the far-reaching impact this has on the capacity of migrant women to have and raise children in safe and healthy environments.

Lucy Lowe is a senior lecturer in medical anthropology. Her research uses a reproductive justice framework to explore the intersection of migration, reproduction, and motherhood. She has conducted research in Scotland and East Africa.

Abolition and reproductive justice: Imagine a world where decisions about your own body were not regulated?

There are strong links between the abolition movement in social work and the principles of reproductive justice framework which posits three related rights: the right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to parent children in a safe and healthy environment (Ross and Solinger, 2017). Both movements have their roots in the abolition of slavery, Black liberation and an understanding of continued coercive control of people’s bodies, especially Black, indigenous and other minorities. In the contemporary political climate, a dangerous alliance between conservative Christians and patriarchal neoliberals has intensified the demand for state control of reproductive and sexual health decision making. This assault on bodily autonomy has led to warped policies that risk the lives of women and gender minorities and creates more social harm.

Application of abolition thinking in current social work discourse focuses mainly on carceral harm: prisons, residential youth custodial services and child protection care and surveillance systems. This talk will extend the argument to pose questions about the perennial problem of bodily autonomy. What if there was a culture in which people felt safe to ask for help with challenging decisions about their healthcare without fear of stigma, coercion and misinformation? What would be achieved, even purely economically, if we prevented the cycle of harm caused by the assault on reproductive freedom? Better mental health, fewer people entering the care-to-prison pipeline and flourishing families with the means to support their children well might be realised by abolishing reproductive regulation.

Liz Beddoe is a professor of social work at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her professional background was in the health sector including older adults and women’s health. Liz has published extensively on critical perspectives on social work education, health social work and professional supervision. Her interests include feminism, reproductive justice, health inequalities, critical social work, student hardship, and the experiences of migrant social workers. Liz is currently investigating social work practitioners’ perspectives on three highly politicised topics where there have been recent legislative changes in Aotearoa New Zealand: abortion, the rights of transgender and nonbinary people, and medically assisted dying. A related study of social work educators’ pedagogical practices teaching contentious topics will begin in 2025.

She is a founding member of the progressive blog Reimagining Social Work and the editor-in-chief of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work journal.