Reproduction and the Expanding Border: Pregnant Migrants as a ‘Problem’ in the 2014 Immigration Act

Abstract

This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.