La femme fait la maison: The Accumulation of Surplus Value through Family Planning in Burkina Faso1

Abstract

AbstractSince the 1960s, demographers, international donors, and governments have calculated the political, economic, and social benefits of modern contraception usage in West Africa. We evidence how family planning technologies (FPTs) that are tethered to population development extract double value (productive and reproductive labour) from Burkinabè women as a method of economic growth. More specifically, we show how concepts like unmet need and contraception prevalence rates (CPR) act as discursive mechanisms that facilitate wealth accumulation from Burkinabè women's reproductive capacities. These mechanisms highlight an additional route through which reproductive labour generates wealth for capital. We argue that these mechanisms, under the auspices of population development, are fundamentally tied to spatialised and racialised concerns over surplus labour and crises of capitalism from the global North. We conclude with nascent meditations on contraception abandonment as a possible form of resistance that Burkinabè women use to decouple their reproductive labour from logics of capitalism.