Let us examine two momentous national elections through the reproductive lens; one that recently concluded over the summer in India and the other, entering a new and more hopeful phase in its presidential election to be held this winter, in the US.
The upcoming US presidential election and the recently concluded Indian national elections both feature a focus on reproduction in right-wing discourses. This highlights feminists' argument that all politics is reproductive politics.
In the US, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance labels childfree individuals as “the childless cat ladies,” while Indian Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi pillories the Muslim community in his speeches for their fecundity, marking them collectively as “zyadha bacche paida karne waale log (people who produce too many children)”. Both Vance and Modi focus on women’s reproductive bodies.
Despite their seemingly contradictory visions, pro-natalist Vance and anti-natalist Modi both draw from a shared political understanding of reproduction, population, and national wellbeing. In caricaturing both child-free choices and that of birthing more than one child, Vance and Modi pull from a politics of reproductive futurism whereby the absent child and too many children (of a particular sort) endanger their respective nations. Both men lean into competing anti-choice positions, as they mark Black, brown, and Muslim reproductive bodies as selfish, irresponsible, and anti-national
For Vance, it is the feminist/queer reproductive subject who, in abandoning their procreative responsibilities towards the nation, demonstrate their lack of sustained, long-term investment and commitment to national wellbeing. For being reproductively derelict, Vance is proposing to disenfranchise these individuals and rewarding those with more children with additional votes. In refusing to produce future citizens for the nation, child free individuals automatically forfeit any legitimate claims to citizenship and hence, he is proposing they be denied their right to the ballot. On the flip side, those who have responsibly reproduced should be rewarded with more than one vote, voting on their children’s behalf. Citizen’s worthiness is unequivocally tied to their commitment to producing the next generation of Americans. In Vance’s national vision, reproductive choices qualify and disqualify American citizens to vote. His extrajudicial definitions impose reproductive worthiness as a litmus test for citizenship as he regards childfree women as “parasitic” freeloaders who, in refusing to reproduce, are not “productive” citizens.
While Vance’s attacks are aimed widely at child-free Americans, they are also laser focused on the Democratic nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris. Through his tortured logic, Vance seeks to ridicule her for both being a woman of colour and what he considers to be her reproductive unworthiness. In choosing to be child-free, Harris, he argues, should automatically be disqualified from the possibility of leading the nation and becoming the next commander-in-chief. Harris’ reproductive body is marked as nationally suspect even as she has two stepchildren from her marriage. What we are witnessing in the current moment is a conservative push-back against impressive feminist success in divorcing definitions of womanhood from biology. In the face of this feminist rewriting of gendered scripts, we are encountering a fierce resurrection of the idea of biological motherhood as the mark of “true” womanhood from various right wing constituencies.
On a lighter note, Vance’s imagination is flawed by his overly masculine and anthropomorphic bias. This imagination is also bankrupt in its failure to recognise that not all child-free humans are singularly feline lovers and that many extend their affections to all sentient beings, including household canines, farm cattle, and/or botanical marvels. Nor are their families solely determined by bloodlines perpetuated through conjugal sex located strictly within monogamous heterosexual matrimony. They forge close and loving bonds with fellow humans and our young ones through exploratory familial and community partnerships. Therefore, what Vance fails to recognise is that child-free individuals can, and many are, deeply committed to kin-making that is expansively interspecies and planetary rather than being strictly tied to human children and man-made national borders.
Shifting our gaze to India, Modi is proposing the opposite argument of overly fecund Muslim reproductive bodies as nationally suspect. Muslim bodies in India are seen as differently derelict from childfree Americans. Historically, the trope of over-population has dogged elite public discourses and sensibilities about India since the early 20th century. Paul Ehrlich’s infamous doomsday book, The Population Bomb, which opens with a dehumanising description of Delhi streets, played an important role in generating alarm about hyper-fecundity and planetary destruction. Even as his was not a new argument, either for Indians or for the global community of eugenicists and neo-Malthusians, the hold of over-population as the principal, if not the singular cause of India’s “under-development,” has been impossible to shake off even in the face of declining national fertility rates across the board, including among the Muslim community.
Mapping the political trajectory of India’s reproductive history illuminates the workings of power across intersecting axes of gender, class, community, and caste. Within modern Indian history, a differential reproductive worth was assigned to subaltern subjects, carrying with it a special burden to prove loyalty to the nation
