Reproductive Agency and the Power to Not Have a Child

By Philip N. Cohen

The latest UNFPA “State of World Population” (here) is titled, “The Real Fertility Crisis: The pursuit of reproductive agency in a changing world.” In the forward, Executive Director Natalia Kanem writes:

“Reproductive agency is more than just freedom from coercion or improved access to services, it is the full range of conditions that enable people to exercise their reproductive rights and ensure true choice, including gender equality, economic stability, decent health and confidence in the future.”

I am not sure about this. Of course I want everyone to have this, and it’s an essential goal for society, a lynchpin of gender equality in particular. But it sidesteps a key aspect of human freedom, which has been very hard won: The agency to decide whether or not to have children given the absence of “gender equality, economic stability, decent health and confidence in the future.”

Consider this quote from the report, from an interview with a 29-year-old woman in Zambia:

“I have one child but don’t plan on having any more. I am unable to do so due to financial instability, precarious employment, unaffordable housing, and the high cost of childcare and education.”

In her precarious economic situation, in which she is not confident she can afford to raise another child, the ability to decide against having another child is incredibly important — it’s a huge, relatively new victory in human history, especially for women. Consider, in a different time or place, a woman in the same economic situation, who was further stuck having more children anyway — in other words, the condition of most women in history. Which woman has more reproductive agency? I’m not sure what to call it, but the person who can choose not to have that child has something very valuable, that should not be minimized. That doesn’t solve her economic problems, but those are economic problems, not reproductive agency problems per se.

You could say that until everyone has the economic conditions necessary to achieve their family goals, they will never have reproductive agency, and I can’t really disagree, but that’s not the best way to understand it, to me. Without economic security and stability there are a lot of things we can’t really have — like happiness, healthcare, retirement, arts and leisure, the ability to live where we want, and real democracy. I just think reproductive agency is at least slightly orthogonal to these markers of social class or economic inequality — that is, the level of reproductive agency varies somewhat independently. Some poor, economically insecure people can access contraception, abortion, other healthcare services, and be protected from gendered violence more than others. And some rich people can’t.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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