Refusing and Redressing Gestational Labor: A Social Reproduction Account of Abortion

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes abortion politics from a Marxist feminist perspective by adapting social reproduction theory (SRT). Despite the urgent threats to abortion access facing feminists worldwide, abortion is largely absent from contemporary SRT. This absence is first addressed from a theoretical perspective through the development of three arguments: that SRT can connect abortion to the biological reproduction of labor power via gestational labor, that abortion can make gestational labor less alienating, and that abortion can function as a refusal of productivism and reproductive sexuality. The article then applies these arguments to a preexisting case study of reproductive justice and women in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. By situating abortion within migrant workers’ struggles over social reproduction processes, this analysis demonstrates that SRT is useful for the study of abortion and can generate insights different from those of the reproductive justice approach alone.