Little Future Workers Rumbling Around In My Stomach

I am not the fucking means to an end. I am not the flesh vessel that carries hope for the future of capital accumulation. I am not the savior of the economy, with little future workers rumbling around in my stomach. I am not the solution.

There’s not a day that goes by in which I don’t see news related to the so-called fertility crisis. Yes, the birth rate is declining in many areas of the world. Social security systems are bound to fail, apparently, and we will spend more time working and less time retired than the generation before us. Futures seem inconceivable and out of reach now. The ostensible end of humanity resulting from a lack of pimple-faced teenagers to work the local Amazon warehouse. A fitting finale for a Godless people.

And somehow, of course, this is the fault of women.

This reality has created a myriad of schemes to encourage child-rearing around the world, some more offensive than others. There are what I deem the ‘encouraging’ plans, which could be seen as well-intentioned but often misguided efforts: Hungary, in 2019 introduced the “Baby Loan” program, offering to give $33,000 to couples who promised to have at least three children. If they didn’t, they would have to pay the money back, essentially turning the miracle of life into a financial transaction. Some rural towns in Japan have offered to pay Tokyo women about $4,100 to move to the countryside, marry, and hopefully eventually have children with rural men (they soon scrapped this plan, realizing city women would rather die alone than marry hillbillies for a few thousand dollars). Every September 12th, the Ulyanovsk region in Russia holds a day off work so couples can stay home and procreate. If a woman gives birth exactly nine months later, she gets prizes like a refrigerator, money, or a car. There are also awards given if a woman has more than ten children. Less gaudily, some countries like France and Finland offer comprehensive parental leave and child benefit packages. It’s hard to argue with these initiatives that legitimately make life easier for parents, but many are often ill-advised about the actual reasons women don’t want to have children.

Then there are, of course, the nationalist narratives. Turkish President Erdoğan has repeatedly urged Turkish women to have at least three children for the sake of the nation. He denounced birth control and family planning, claiming they are Western plots to weaken Turkey, calling childless women “deficient” and “incomplete” in a speech in 2016. In South Korea, a country with mandatory military service for men, politicians have even made the argument that a shrinking population makes their state vulnerable to North Korean invasion (we need more kids–to send to die in war!). After decades of a disastrous one-child policy, China reversed gears and started pushing for more births, setting up multiple fertility initiatives and hailing women with three children in state media as “model citizens”. The list goes on.

The most sickly of the policies are obviously the repressive and coercive ones, relating to access to contraception, abortion, sterilization, and reproductive autonomy to force higher birth rates. Iran recently limited abortion even further, outlawed advertisements for family planning, and criminalized vasectomies (a rare restriction on men’s bodily autonomy). Poland is notorious in Europe for having a near-total abortion ban, while in Nicaragua and El Salvador, there is a total abortion ban. I’m watching my own country tumble down this path since the overturning of Roe V. Wade–in some states in the USA, doctors can be prosecuted for performing abortions. They say it’s about God. I legitimately can’t decide if it’s more about hating women or more about wanting an endless supply of workers.

So where does that bring us?

Having concerns about the economy as a regular person is understandable: nobody wants to work forever to receive crumbs in the end. However, lodged between people’s complaints, there is often a quiet disdain for women, an expectation, sometimes a secret longing that rights were never given to us. People forget that when birth rates were high, we were physically or socially forced into marriages and given no other options. Our dreams were limited to domestic life and child-rearing. The normalization of rape and criminalization of abortion meant that there was an endless supply of workers to grow the economy. It is still like this in many places of the world.

Women have always worked through history, even if this work tended to be undervalued, underpaid, and restricted to certain trades. It was only during the early industrial revolution that distinct public and private spheres began to form, and an expectation for middle and upper class women to stay grew. But since the 20th century, leaders of capitalist and communist economies alike realized that giving women more access to the labour market would actually help their respective causes. While it’s an undeniably good thing that women were given a chance to financially support themselves, I would argue that these rights weren’t always given for altruistic reasons–liberating women from the household also gave employers a massive new base of employees to underpay and overwork. Women can do it all, as long as it’s in a factory making money for some guy! The expectation keeps shifting—not based on what’s best for women, but on what’s best for the economy at any given time. When they need more workers, we're told we can "have it all." When they need more children, we're told to go back home. It was never about us.

This article is not about what the correct approach to increasing fertility rates should be, or why these policies often fail. There’s enough written about that. This article is about the hidden assumption that lies in between lamenting about birth rates–that women, with their bodies, owe the economy something. And we continue to be pawn pieces in their precious game of economic growth and capital accumulation.

I can’t tell you how fucking dehumanizing it is to be thought of as a means to the end. A vessel. My body doesn’t matter to you–our cities often don't give us comfortable public bathrooms, soft places to sit, free services to use. But suddenly, when it comes to having children, my body is worshipped–mother earth! The beauty of life! And once we give birth, we are discarded. It’s dehumanizing, because in these conversations, women are reduced to resources instead of people. How many children can we produce? Can we be incentivized like cows being fed more grain? Politicians lament the declining birth rates like national emergencies–like running out of water or food. As if women’s bodies were a natural resource that needed to be extracted, managed, and maximized. As if we belonged to them. 

I want to hug my mother and all the women before her. I think about the ones who never had a chance to say no. I think about the grandmothers who were married off before they understood what life was. About the women who had children they never wanted, but no one ever asked them if they did. 

So, I often remain incredibly quiet and uncomfortable during these conversations. The sometimes well-intentioned (but equally often ignorant and misogynistic) men who groan about fertility levels never seem to fully get it. Capitalism requires at least 3% growth per year to sustain itself, but honestly, that’s not our problem. If an economy cannot survive without controlling my body, then maybe that economy should die.