Book Review
Book Review | Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade, by Sara Matthiesen (University of California Press, 2021)
Columbia University
mcf2180@columbia.edu
On the eve of December 16, 1975, nearly five hundred incarcerated women at California Institution for Women marched together to the superintendent’s office and set fire to a collection of Christmas trees and decorations. The women’s rage and desperation stemmed from the fact that the administration had rescinded all visitor and telephone privileges, and then had totally neglected to respond to any of the women’s concerns. Or, as one of the women put it, they had to do something because "those fuckers never do anything" (59, emphasis added).
A couple of years later, several hundred miles away, an eighteen-year-old Black woman named Carloyn went to the hospital. She waited there for three hours before she was reprimanded for fiddling with a blood pressure cuff. Upset, confused, and four months pregnant, Carolyn left. It was only when her baby died during labor several months later that she was diagnosed with anemia and high blood pressure. In the wake of her incalculable loss, members of the San Francisco Bay Area–based Coalition to Fight Infant Mortality charged the Alameda County Board of Supervisors with "genocide by neglect" (94).
Both these cases of state-sanctioned abandonment are taken from Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade by Sara Matthiesen, a meticulously researched account of the work involved in "family making" at a time when the fantasy of meaningful choice has become a fiction for all but "an ever shrinking few" (21). Reproduction Reconceived thus breaks decisively with the disciplinary conventions of "labor history" (11) just as confidently as it builds upon the critical traditions of Marxist feminisms, Black feminisms, and reproductive justice movements. The result is a feminist history of family making in North America since the 1970s, told from the perspective of those—like Carolyn, the Coalition to Fight Infant Mortality, and the women at California Institution for Women—who labor on the margins but whose life-giving work is rarely recognized as such. As a work of feminist theory, the book is driven by the methodological question of how to "make state inaction visible" (15). And as a work of feminist history, it is driven by the critical commitment to make visible the myriad labors that this neglect has engendered. This, then, is the "reproduction" that Matthiesen asks her reader to reconceive: the labors that state neglect produces, just as it simultaneously refuses to recognize them.
Early in the introduction Matthiesen reminisces that, whenever she told people about her project, they "without fail…assumed reproductive politics meant the right to abortion," noting that "nothing looms larger than the Supreme Court’s decision" (5). In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson—which passed almost exactly nine months after the book’s publication—these words inevitably hit a different note. Roe now looms larger in public discourse than ever before and the public outcry that has followed its overturning exemplifies precisely that which Matthiesen is so deeply invested in challenging: the tendency to think of reproductive freedoms within the framework of individual rights and individual choice without addressing the material conditions that make different choices possible. Black feminist scholarship on reproductive justice, "racialized reproduction" (Ross and Solinger 2017, 5), and "stratified reproduction" (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995, 3) has long exposed the poverty of rights discourse through documenting how lack of access and resources means that some women are forced to "relinquish the right to reproduction itself" (Davis 1981, 128). Matthiesen is indebted to this legacy, but her contribution rests on showing how the liberal fantasy of personal autonomy and individual responsibility is decimated just as much by explicit attacks on marginalized populations as it is by inaction, indifference, and—to use her key term—neglect.
Since the passing of Dobbs v. Jackson, pro-abortion activists have also found themselves repeatedly stating that abortion bans don’t stop abortion. Instead, they make abortion more dangerous, placing an ever greater burden on those who have to mitigate that risk. This is striking evidence of another of Matthiesen’s most urgent interventions: state neglect doesn’t just punish those who are its victims, but it necessitates that they have to do more work to survive. This "labor of survival" (20) extends—far beyond the private household and the workplace—to the prison yard, prison cells, hospitals and physicians’ offices, children’s visiting centers, experimental drug trials, AIDS service organizations, hearings on women and AIDS, crisis pregnancy centers, welfare offices, among countless other places. As a result, these are the sites that Matthiesen travels to in order to trace and document the work that women have done, across four decades, to challenge, contest and mitigate the effects of different forms of state neglect.
To these ends, each chapter assembles an impressive archive in service of naming a specific type of neglect: legal, carceral, medical, and cumulative. Chapter 1 begins with examining the ways in which lesbian parents, after they "seized the means of reproduction" (44) via artificial insemination in the 1970s, found that they were especially vulnerable given the law’s inability to formally recognize them. Chapter 2 then shift gears and explores how the rise of mass incarceration has systematically stratified access to family through, first, punishing poor women of color disproportionately, and then forcing them to navigate the "neglect that is integral to conditions of confinement in the United States" (90). Chapters 3 and 4 then turn to two health crises, first ushered in by an impoverished healthcare system, and then made dramatically worse by the failure of state officials to act: Black infant mortality and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Finally, in what is arguably her most controversial chapter, Matthiesen close reads the testimonies of volunteers and clients at pregnancy crisis centers to show how these pro-life centers often provide "lifelines of last resort" (21) for women that the state has otherwise abandoned.
Taken together, each of these chapters offers, firstly, an incredibly capacious definition of reproductive labor and, secondly, something almost resembling a feminist theory of the state. Thus, while Matthiesen is more explicitly in dialogue with reproductive justice activists and scholars, I believe her work should also be brought into conversation with recent work in trans and queer studies that likewise refuses too singular a notion of "the state" and instead documents how it "comes into being through the accretion of practices, conventions and creations" (Currah 2022, 26). Indeed, if Paisley Currah focuses explicitly on what the state does, Matthiesen’s work offers a vital compliment through theorizing those moments when "the state" reveals its presence through its absence. For, in her words, "what the state has not done is as important as what it has done" (14). Her work thus builds consciously on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other urban studies researchers, whose concept of "organized abandonment" (2007, 178)—borrowed, in turn, from David Harvey—describes how the neoliberal state works by exploiting those left vulnerable to its enormous disorder.
On March 1, 1970, the front page of the New York Times reported that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then a counsellor to President Nixon, was recommending a policy of "benign neglect." This term has since been taken up to name precisely that which Matthiesen systematically describes: the rise of neoliberalism was characterized by the total decimation of the twentieth-century liberal welfare state, which, in turn, inaugurated a "crisis of care" (Fraser 2016). Additionally, it proves one of her most central maxims: "Neglect was not a foregone conclusion but instead became the prevailing norm through the repetition of decisions" (18). Ultimately, it is through offering an incredibly detailed history of these many "decisions" that Matthiesen—even as she adamantly states that she is not convinced that the term "neoliberalism" still has "explicative value" (13)—inadvertently charts different "plot points" (10) for its ascension. That said, even as these various plot points successfully challenge most historical accounts of the neoliberal economic agenda, they nevertheless stay strictly within a clearly demarcated national frame. For this reason, it is worth considering how this history of family making would be further complicated and enhanced by an adequate reckoning with the transnational labor flows that have also come to define this period. What, for instance, of the work performed by domestic migrant workers?
Reproduction Reconceived instead opens with citing another article from the Times about "college educated mothers’ stalled re-entry into the United States labor force" (1). Everything considered, this is an odd place for Mathiessen to begin, not least because it risks presenting her monograph as yet another account of the pitfalls of "white" liberal feminism to the same disenchanted liberal audience that religiously reads the Times. Readers of Reproduction Reconceived who are even remotely as well-versed in accounts of reproductive justice and social reproduction theory as her will already understand, all too well, that liberal feminism only further legitimated the transition to neoliberalism and that this is precisely the problem with the emphasis it places on individual "choice," individual rights, and legal recognition. Hence, to describe Matthiessen’s work in these terms is to actually do it a grave disservice. For while it is true that the book is responding directly to the bankruptcy of a politics concerned only with what choices are legally possible, this is, thankfully, only its starting point. In actual fact, and even as Matthiessen is steadfastly unconcerned with debating academic terminology, her work offers a powerful model for how to redefine and rethink "reproduction," "labor," and "the state" in a time that is defined, overwhelmingly, by forms of state neglect. These are forms of neglect that, as she painstakingly shows, are anything but benign.
References
Currah, Paisley. 2022. Sex is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York, NY, Vintage Books.
Fraser, Nancy. 2016. "Capitalism's crisis of care." New Left Review 63 (4): 30-37.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ginsburg, Faye and Rapp, Rayna. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ross, Loretta, and Solinger, Rickie. 2017. Reproductive justice: An introduction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Author Bio
Mia Florin-Sefton is a PhD candidate and University Writing Instructor at Columbia University. She also teaches courses in feminist theory and queer literature at Taconic Correctional Facility.