Jenny Brown
893340
research-article2020
NLFXXX10.1177/1095796019893340New Labor ForumBrown
The Hidden Fight over
Women’s Work
Jenny Brown
Keywords
women workers, feminism, demography, social reproduction, child care
The U.S. birth rate is now the lowest it has ever
been. Other countries, confronting low birth rates
in the twentieth century, instituted supports to
make raising children more appealing. They pro-
vided universal child care, health care, paid leave,
child allowances, and shorter working hours. The
United States, by contrast, has taken the low-cost
route to raising new generations: poor access to
birth control and abortion. But despite these
obstacles, women are refusing. This article will
explore what it would take for working people in
the United States—and women in particular—to
leverage our spontaneous birth slowdown into
family-supporting policies.
Starting in the 1980s, while birth rates in
most developed countries dropped, U.S. rates
remained elevated. We had higher teen preg-
nancy rates, and higher unintended birth rates,
about twice those of Sweden and France.1 But
more recently, the U.S. rate has declined, across
ethnic groups, and is now considerably below
the 2.1 “replacement rate” required for a stable
population, reaching 1.72 in 2018 (see figure on
following page). The women’s liberation group
Redstockings in 2001 described this as a “birth
strike,” a reaction to the difficult conditions
women face having and raising children.2
Surveys indicate that potential parents are
deterred by the costs of child care and housing,
long or irregular work hours, low wages, unreli-
able health care, and student debt.3 In National
Women’s Liberation (for which I am an orga-
nizer), women name these factors as reasons to
stop at one child or have none at all. In con-
sciousness-raising meetings, testifiers describe
the stress and exhaustion of their “double
day”—eight or more hours of paid work and
New Labor Forum
2020, Vol. 29(1) 58­–66
Copyright © 2020, The Murphy Institute,
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1095796019893340
https://doi.org/10.1177/1095796019893340
journals.sagepub.com/home/nlf
then an additional eight hours a day of unpaid
care work and housework. Others recount dif-
ficulty finding partners who are willing to take
the plunge into parenthood, wary of the time
commitment and costs. Some say they were
deterred by memories of their mothers’ struggle
to raise them.
As in other countries with modest birth rates,
government and corporate planners from both
sides of the aisle would like the U.S. birth rate
to be higher. “Simply put, companies are run-
ning out of workers, customers or both,” the
Wall Street Journal claimed in 2015. “In either
case, economic growth suffers.”4
“Declining birth rates constitute a problem
for the survival and security of nations . . . in the
broadest existential sense of national security,”
wrote Steven Philip Kramer of the National
Defense University in his 2014 book, The Other
Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do
about Falling Birth Rates. “For several hundred
years, economic growth has been tied to pros-
perity . . . Growth in population has increased
the size of the domestic market and labor
force.” While many scholars continue to worry
about the effect on the environment of expand-
ing global populations, in fact birth rates are
now dropping in most of the world and total
population is expected to be stable or declining
by 2100. Among continents, Europe, Asia,
North and South America are expected to have
less population in 2100 than in 2050. Only
Africa is expected to grow.5
Corresponding Author:
Jenny Brown, jbrown72073@gmail.com
60 New Labor Forum 29(1)
Data from Jay Weinstein and Vijayan K. Pillai, Demography: The Science of Population (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2016), 208, and National Center for Health Statistics Births, Final Data for 2016.
Immigration: Instant Adults
The United States has always relied on immi-
gration for low-cost population growth. One
U.S. pundit gleefully called immigrants “instant
adults,” because the cost of raising them is
borne by other societies.6 However, in keeping
with the desire not to spend anything to raise
and educate their workforce, many employers
oppose family reunification, where authorized
immigrants can eventually bring members of
their families. So too do politicians: While
advocating for immigration, former Florida
Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, writes,
Extended family members typically do
not produce the economic benefits that
work-based immigrants do, and they
impose far greater costs. Many extended
family immigrants are children, elderly
people, or others who do not work[,] yet
often consume . . . social services such as
schooling and health care.7
Lately, some pro-immigration conservatives
are worried that sending countries like Mexico
have seen birth rate declines, while recent
immigrants have shown a tendency to organize
for better conditions. The one thing employers
and their political representatives all agree on is
that they do not want immigrants to have rights
on the job or in the community. This is why they
favor crackdowns that terrorize immigrant com-
munities at the same time supporting guest-
worker programs which deny workers most
labor rights. President Donald Trump, while he
sent troops to the border to block families fleeing
violence in Central America, supported adding
30,000 slots to the H2B guest worker program.
Lower Birth Rates and
the 99 Percent
For ordinary people, gently declining popula-
tion is not a concern. While corporate think
tanks decry low birth rates and warn that an
aging population will be left destitute by a
smaller working cohort, these warnings are
largely an excuse to cut Social Security. In real-
ity, there is plenty of production to support
retirees,8 but rampant inequality means that
productivity gains have been stovepiped to the
top in the form of unbelievable fortunes that
allow multi-billionaires to buy islands and
Brown 61
contemplate colonizing Mars. Because only
earned income is taxed for Social Security,
these unearned fortunes evade the system
entirely. Meanwhile, if the $7.25 federal mini-
mum wage had kept up with productivity
increases, it would now be over $18.9
Surveys indicate that potential
parents are deterred by the costs
of child care and housing, long or
irregular work hours, low wages,
unreliable health care, and
student debt.
The 99 percent may not suffer from lower
birth rates, but capitalism requires growth, and
one element has always been population growth.
From the inception of capitalism in Europe,
populations grew steadily. Only this century is
population projected to decline in many coun-
tries, a process that started in Japan in 2011.
“Capitalism has never flourished except when
accompanied by population growth,” writes
Philip Longman of the New America
Foundation, “and it is now languishing in those
parts of the world (such as Japan, Europe, and
the Great Plains of the United States) where
population has become stagnant.”10 So far, U.S.
employers are avoiding the costs of reproduc-
tion of their workforce by blocking efforts to
institute paid family leave and universal child-
care, but the declining birth rate indicates this is
not going to work much longer.
From Family Wage to Social
Wage
How did we get to this point? The labor move-
ment in the United States struggled to make fam-
ily life tenable in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century by demanding a family wage
which would allow one male worker to support a
full-time female homemaker and caregiver, and
their offspring. While it was sexist, it had one
progressive element writes Kathie Sarachild of
Redstockings, “It recognizes the employers’ obli-
gation to pay something for the labor of family
care, including the labor of replenishing and
maintaining generations of the workforce.”11
The family wage came to include health care
as a fringe benefit of employment. Spurred by
World War II era labor shortages and wage con-
trols, employers eager to attract workers estab-
lished health care as a fringe benefit to
employment. And after the war, while employ-
ers throughout Europe were giving in to
demands for universal health care, here in the
United States, employers—partly by redbaiting
advocates of universal programs—retained the
power to determine a worker’s health care
access. For most women, that meant that health
care coverage depended on marriage, and on
the man’s employer, further extending the male
supremacist power of the family wage.
The family wage, even in its stingiest form,
was an excuse to pay women less, so it conflicted
with another important union goal, equal pay. In
light industrial jobs, the garment industry, com-
munications, and food chain work, women’s
lower pay has been used to ratchet down men’s
pay. Over time, whole occupations switched
from “male” to “female” to take advantage of
women’s lower pay: telephone operators, bank
clerks, teachers.12 As a result, equal pay has been
regarded as a working-class priority, at least by
the most forward-thinking portions of the labor
movement. United Electrical Workers (UE)
strikers at General Electric stayed out for four
additional weeks in 1946 demanding that women
receive the same raises as men.13 Today, equal
pay for men and women in the same job is basic
to union contracts.
One U.S. pundit gleefully called
immigrants “instant adults,”
because the cost of raising them is
borne by other societies.
While the family wage never covered all of
the working class—many black families never
got it—for unionized workers, the family wage
did make it possible to support both a breadwin-
ner and a homemaker, along with children, on
one paycheck. In 1950, 20 percent of married
white women worked outside the home, while
31 percent of married non-white women did.14
As wages stagnated in the 1970s, families
kept up their standard of living by sending both
62 New Labor Forum 29(1)
spouses to work. Sending out an additional
worker stabilized household income, but at the
cost of forty hours or more per week of family
care time. In effect, where employers as a whole
had been supporting two adults and their chil-
dren in exchange for one forty-hour a week job,
they were now getting eighty hours or more of
work for essentially the same price. The care
and homemaker job, meanwhile, was squeezed
into the day after work, leading to the double
day. Now, 68 percent of working-age women
with children under six work, two thirds of
them full time.15
Labor governments in Europe resolved this
contradiction between equal pay and family-
supporting wages by mandating that employers
provide, or pay into a government fund to pro-
vide, a substantial “social wage” to replace the
family wage, including long paid maternal or
parental leave, sick leave, and vacations, guar-
anteed child care and health care, and free
schooling through college. These policies have
endured despite changes in governments, even
expanding in places, although in some coun-
tries, such as the United Kingdom, they are now
under attack.
. . . [C]apitalism requires growth,
and one element has always been
population growth.
Leave time is guaranteed by law, and paid
through a public insurance fund, making it
independent of one’s particular employment
situation. The costs are spread among employ-
ers, eliminating the financial incentive to dis-
criminate against those of childrearing age. So,
while employers in the United States have been
avoiding the costs of raising successive genera-
tions of workers—putting the burden on women
in the form of uncompensated labor—in coun-
tries with a substantial social wage, employers
are compelled to contribute.
Countries in which sexist discrimination
makes it difficult for women to work and have
children, such as Japan and Italy, have not
experienced higher birth rates, while those that
make the combination inviting, such as Sweden
and France, have. Steffen Kroehnert, a
researcher for the Institute for Population and
Development in Berlin, explains,
For a long time, politicians said that the
high participation of women in the labor
market is responsible for the low birth
rate, because when women go into the
labor market, they don’t have children
anymore. But interestingly, when you
look at . . . western European countries,
the fertility rate is higher in countries
with a higher labor market participation
of women.16
French demographer Laurent Toulemon
contrasts France to Japan, where pregnant
workers are regularly fired:
A [Japanese] woman entering into a
relationship must also accept marriage,
obey her husband, have a child, stop
working after it is born and make room
for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or
nothing. In France the package is more
flexible.17
As U.S. journalist Stephanie Mencimer put
it, “Conservatives thought that if they only
made it harder for mothers to work, women
would stay home. Instead, women stopped hav-
ing kids.”18
Panic in Sweden
Sweden’s family policies—480 days of paren-
tal leave, for example—are the envy of people
in the United States, but few know that these
policies started with a panic about low birth
rates.19 In 1900, Swedish women were having
four children, on average. A growing industrial
sector led to rapid urbanization, with cramped
housing and harsh conditions for workers. By
1930 that figure had dropped below two, caus-
ing conservatives to call for a crackdown on
contraceptives and a stop to women working
outside the home. On the other side of the
debate, the union-linked Social Democratic
Workers’ Party—the dominant party in the
Swedish parliament starting in 1932—was
Brown 63
focused on improving working conditions and
schools. They favored more birth control free-
dom and “on the whole they did not worry
about the risk of depopulation.”20
Into the debate stepped a young Social
Democratic couple, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, an
economist and a social psychologist, respec-
tively. They cowrote a controversial blockbuster,
Crisis in the Population Question (1934), which
forged a third path between conservatives and
the Social Democrats. What they did with the
two opposing positions “seemed to the public
almost like magic,” writes the Myrdals’ daughter
Sissela Bok. “They wholly accepted the conser-
vative view regarding the great danger that
depopulation posed to the country, but managed
to draw the opposite conclusion, that this danger
presented ‘the most forceful argument for the
profound and radical reshaping of society.’”21
. . . [W]hile employers in the U.S.
have been avoiding the costs of
raising successive generations of
workers . . . in countries with a
substantial social wage, employers
are compelled to contribute.
Newly urbanized and with industrial jobs,
Swedish women were resisting their traditional
roles. A government commission found that
women did not want to get married, “locking
them in a cycle of child rearing and housekeep-
ing” that “prevented them from participating in
paid labor and higher education.”22 The Myrdals
prescribed free health care, free school lunches,
housing subsidies for families with children,
and laws protecting women from getting fired
when they got pregnant. They also favored sex
education in schools and complete access to
contraception. Their book launched a furious
debate, and resulted in discussion groups all
over the country.
While the conservative population program
consisted of banning contraception, the Myrdals
suggested reforms that would benefit everyone,
but especially women, who were engaging in
what Alva Myrdal thought of, disapprovingly,
as a “birth strike.”23 While she disliked the
strike, it created the pressure that made possible
her ideas for changing the condition of women.
Gunnar Myrdal reflected in 1938 that the low
birth rate “turns political opinions away from
conservatism and toward radicalism . . . The
population problem is utilized, as the conserva-
tive Swedish economist bitterly complains, as a
‘crow-bar for social reforms.’”24
Sweden’s family policies . . . are the
envy of people in the U.S., but few
know that these policies started
with a panic about low birth rates.
The union-backed government took up
many of the Myrdals’ suggestions, protecting
pregnant women from firing and subsidizing
hospital births. Universal child allowances
were introduced in 1948, along with a system
of health care for all which ramped up after
World War II.
Of course, the Swedish “middle way” is not
the only possible road to generous family poli-
cies, and it may not have been possible to win
without the example of the Soviet Union and,
after World War II, other eastern bloc countries.
Across the socialist world, contraception and
abortion were legalized before capitalist coun-
tries did so, with abortions provided free in most
cases. Even with scarce resources, post-revolu-
tionary Russia provided maternity hospitals,
nurseries, and the socialization of housework
through canteens and laundries. As they recov-
ered after the war, Communist countries added
paid leave, child care, and an enormous expan-
sion of housing and health care systems. They
served as an inspiration to workers’ movements
in neighboring countries.
A Birth Strike
As with any important and undervalued job, the
necessity of social reproduction is revealed
when the work is not done. Sanitation workers
are taken for granted until they strike and then
everyone realizes that without them we would
rapidly drown in garbage. So it is with having
and rearing children. When the birth rate drops,
suddenly the value of our unpaid labor becomes
visible, accompanied by pleas and threats to
64 New Labor Forum 29(1)
return to work. While the birth rate discussion
is not always open, the pleas and threats are
now visible—from Ross Douthat asking for
“More Babies Please” in a New York Times
opinion piece in 2012, to Paul Ryan, as speaker
of the House, remarking in a 2017 press confer-
ence, “We need to have higher birth rates in this
country” or cuts to Social Security would surely
follow.25 We also face the threat of abortion
being outlawed.
This situation has been unclear to most femi-
nists, perhaps because the second wave of femi-
nism arose during the brief period (1955-1975)
when the establishment was in full panic over
high birth rates. While the panic subsided with
the birth rate, most feminists have tended to
suspect that government and corporations
would prefer us to have fewer children, espe-
cially if we are poor or not white. Now, how-
ever, the evidence is in that even for women of
color, reproductive coercion is now largely
aimed at raising the birth rate. There’s a good
reason for feminists to believe that lower birth
rates were the goal. In the 1960s, as the cotton
crop became mechanized, Mississippi was
ground zero for forced sterilization of African-
American women. The sterilization operation
was so common it was sourly referred to as a
“Mississippi appendectomy.” Now there is one
embattled abortion clinic in the whole state, but
thirty-eight “crisis pregnancy centers” aimed at
pushing women to continue their unwanted
pregnancies.26 In Texas, where restrictions and
regulations closed eighty-two family planning
clinics after 2011, birth control use went down
and childbearing rose 27 percent for low-waged
and unemployed women in the affected areas,
compared to areas that still had birth control
access.27
New Leverage?
Given our lowest-ever birth rate, can we lever-
age more of a social wage here? Knowing the
history helps: The fact that employers used to
contribute, through the family wage, and have
now completely shed these costs explains how
the rich have gotten so rich in the United States.
Employers have been able to achieve this goal
through the destruction of unions, who fought
for the family wage in the first place. Now
some, like the National Nurses United, are lead-
ing the fight for the social wage in the form of
Medicare for All.
Given our lowest-ever birth rate,
can we leverage more of a social
wage here?
International comparisons are also a powerful
tool. People in the United States have been bom-
barded for a century with the claim that wages
and working conditions are the best in the United
States. Recall the boosterism of the National
Association of Manufacturers billboards cap-
tured by depression-era photographers, claiming
“World’s Highest Wages—There’s no way like
the American way.” Nowadays, health insurance
company apologists insist we have the best
health care system, though the World Health
Organization in 2000 ranked our system number
37 in the world.28
The United States is nearly alone in the
world in providing no paid maternity or paren-
tal leave. It is joined by Suriname, and Papua
New Guinea and a few other Pacific Island
nations. Fifty countries provide six months or
more paid leave.29 Even today’s post-socialist
countries do better: Russia, for example, pro-
vides 140 days of fully paid maternity leave,
and up to eighteen months at 40 percent of the
mother’s salary. You can leave your job for up
to three years and keep your position.
Consciousness-Raising
Another building block is women’s liberation
consciousness-raising, in which women com-
pare their situations and draw conclusions
about who benefits from the way things are.
When women compare their individual strate-
gies, they discover that no matter what choice
they make, they still land in the same trap: the
stress and misery that they are experiencing is
not because of their own failings, and it cannot
be fixed individually. Consciousness-raising
reveals that we are up against a system that
requires roughly eight hours a day of unpaid
work, mostly from women, to raise upcoming
generations.
Brown 65
When we investigate who benefits from our
uncompensated labor, we start to understand
that parenting is not a private affair, like the
adoption of an expensive pet or hobby. The
whole society is benefiting from our work,
employers and the rich most of all. This is not
obvious on its face. Many an anti-tax individual
will ask why they should pay for schools when
they have no children. These sentiments
obscure the reality that in a complex society,
everyone is dependent on everyone else. The
bearing, rearing, and educating of successive
generations is a necessary precondition for the
continuation of society and every individual in
it. Childbearing, childrearing, and care work is
the uncounted economic output that makes the
rest of the economy possible.
Feminist advance now requires a confronta-
tion with the power of employers. The Women’s
Liberation Movement made important strides
starting in the 1960s, but in areas that did not cut
too deeply into the prerogatives of capital and
employers. We made progress on appearance
and dress codes; integration of all-male spaces
and workplaces; men doing child care and
housework; better sex; and educational equality.
The areas where we are stuck or going back-
ward are those that require capitalists to cede
control or cough up resources. Into this second
category fall equal pay, public child care, paid
family leave, universal health care, and basic
income guarantees that allow women economic
independence from men, and workers indepen-
dence from employers. Abortion and birth con-
trol are now firmly in the second category, as
employers try to extract unpaid reproductive
labor from women while avoiding its costs.
Given these conditions, U.S. feminists will
need to combine forces with other political
movements that challenge the power of employ-
ers and the rich.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Jenny Brown https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7147
-4460
Notes
  1. The United States’ unplanned birth rate was 30
percent of all births, compared to 18 percent
in France, and 16 percent in Sweden accord-
ing to “Abortion in Context: United States and
Worldwide,” Issues in Brief 1999 Series, No.
1, Allan Guttmacher Institute. The Centers for
Disease Control estimates that 37 percent of
U.S. births are unintended. William D. Mosher,
Jo Jones, and Joyce C. Abma. “Intended and
Unintended Births in the United States: 1982–
2010.” National Health Statistics Reports, No.
55 (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health
Statistics, 2012).
 2. Kathie Sarachild, “Beyond the Family Wage:
A Women’s Liberation View of the Social
Wage,” in Women’s Liberation and National
Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America,
eds. Kathie Sarachild, Jenny Brown, and Amy
Coenen (New York: Redstockings, 2001), 22.
 3. Claire Cain Miller, “Americans Are Having
Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why.” The New
York Times, July 5, 2018, available at nytimes
.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-hav
ing-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html.
 4. Greg Ip, “The World’s New Population Time
Bomb: Too Few People,” The Wall Street
Journal, November 22, 2015, available at
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-demograph
ics-rule-the-global-economy-1448284890.
  5. United Nations, Department of Economic and
Social Affairs, Population Division. World
Population Prospects 2019: Highlights (ST/
ESA/SER.A/423), 2019, available at https://
www.un.org/development/desa/publications/
world-population-prospects-2019-highlights
.html.
 6. Ben Wattenberg, “The East Solution to the
Social Security Crisis,” The New York Times,
June 22, 1997, available at https://www
.nytimes.com/1997/06/22/magazine/the-east-
solution-to-the-social-security-crisis.html.
  7. Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick, Immigration Wars:
Forging an American Solution (New York:
Threshold Editions, 2013), 20-21.
 8. Dean Baker, “Statement on the 2016 Social
Security Trustees Report,” Center for Economic
and Policy Research, June 22, 2016, available at
http://cepr.net/press-center/press-releases/dean-
baker-s-statement-on-the-2016-social-security-
trustees-report.
66 New Labor Forum 29(1)
 9. Lawrence Mishel, Elise Gould, and Josh
Bivens, “Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts,”
Economic Policy Institute, January 6, 2015, fig.
8, available at http://www.epi.org/publication/
charting-wage-stagnation/.
10. Phillip Longman, The Empty Cradle: How
Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity
and What to Do about It (New York: Basic
Books, 2004), 4.
11. Sarachild, “Beyond the Family Wage,” 22.
12. Colette Price, “New Ways of Keeping Women
out of Paid Labor,” in Redstockings, Feminist
Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978),
86-110.
13. Lisa Kannenberg, “The Impact of the Cold
War on Women’s Trade Union Activism: The
UE Experience,” Labor History 34 (Spring-
Summer 1993), 309-23.
14. Claudia Goldin, “Female Labor Force
Participation: The Origin of Black and White
Differences, 1870 and 1880,” Journal of
Economic History 37, no. 1 (1977), 87-108.
15. Full time is defined as thirty-five hours a
week or more. Diana Lavery, “More Mothers
of Young Children in U.S. Workforce,”
Population Reference Bureau, November
7, 2012, available at https://www.prb.org/
us-working-mothers-with-children/.
16. Rachel Martin, “Germany Frets About Women
in Shrinking Workforce,” Morning Edition,
National Public Radio, May 24, 2006, available
at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php
?storyId=5427278.
17. Anne Chemin, “France’s Baby Boom Secret:
Get Women into Work and Ditch Rigid Family
Norms,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015,
available at http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2015/mar/21/france-population-europe
-fertility-rate.
18. Stephanie Mencimer, “The Baby Boycott,”
Washington Monthly, June 1, 2001, available
at https://washingtonmonthly.com/2001/06/01/
the-baby-boycott/.
19. Similar population declines, and responses,
also occurred in Denmark and Norway. For
Denmark, see Hilda Romer Christensen,
“Socialist Feminists and Feminist Socialists
in Denmark, 1920-1940,” in Women and
Socialism—Socialism and Women: Europe
Between the World Wars, eds. Helmut Gruber
and Pamela Graves (New York: Berghahn
Books, 1998), 497. For Norway, see Ida Blom,
“Voluntary Motherhood 1900-1930: Theories
and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an
International Perspective,” in Maternity and
Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of
the European Welfare States 1880s-1950s,
eds. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 21-39.
20. Sissela Bok, Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 117.
21. Ibid., 117.
22. Asa Lundqvist, Family Policy Paradoxes:
Gender Equality and Labor Market Regulation
in Sweden, 1930–2010 (Bristol: Policy Press,
2011), 27.
23. Bok, Alva Myrdal, 102.
24. William J. Barber, Gunnar Myrdal: An
Intellectual Biography (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 58.
25. Ross Douthat, “More Babies Please,” The
New York Times, December 1, 2012, SR11;
Christine Emba, “Paul Ryan’s Recipe for a
Robust Economy: Have More Babies,” The
Washington Post, December 15, 2017, available
at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
paul-ryans-recipe-for-a-robust-economy-have-
more-babies/2017/12/15/dcd767b4-e1dc-11e7-
89e8-edec16379010_story.html.
26. Shannon Brewer, director of the Jackson
(Mississippi) Women’s Health Organization,
and Maisie Crow, speaking to Leonard Lopate,
“Abortion Access Collides with Pro-Life
Activists in the Deep South,” WNYC, June 10,
2016, available at https://www.wnyc.org/story/
maisie-crow-and-shannon-brewer-last-abor
tion-clinic-mississippi/.
27. Amanda J. Stevenson, Imelda M. Flores-
Vazquez, Richard L. Allgeyer, Pete Schenkkan,
and Joseph E. Potter, “Effect of Removal of
Planned Parenthood from the Texas Women’s
Health Program,” New England Journal of
Medicine 374, no. 9 (March 3, 2016): 853-60.
The women studied were at or below 185 per-
cent of the federal poverty level.
28. World Health Organization, “The World Health
Report 2000—Health systems: Improving per-
formance,” June 21, 2000, available at https://
www.who.int/whr/2000/en/.
29. Jennifer Ludden, “On Your Mark, Give Birth, Go
Back to Work,” All Things Considered, National
Public Radio, October 4, 2016, available at
https://www.npr.org/2016/10/04/495839747/
on-your-mark-give-birth-go-back-to-work.
Author Biography
Jenny Brown is an organizer with National Women’s
Liberation and former editor of Labor Notes. She is
author of Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over
Women’s Work (PM Press, 2019) and Without
Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now (Verso, 2019).