Austerity as reproductive injustice: Did local government spending cuts unequally impact births?

Large local government spending cuts in England, spanning over a decade of austerity politics, have severely restricted the universal services and public goods that shape parenting environments. Drawing on the Reproductive Justice framework, we ask whether restricting the right to parent in safe and healthy environments impinged on the right to have children. To do so, we introduce a new quantitative approach for “thinking with” Reproductive Justice. Using nationally representative UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) data and a within-between random effects model, we analyse whether local government spending cuts were associated with intersectional inequalities in childbearing over the 2010-2020 period. We find that local government spending cuts significantly decreased the probability of having a(nother) birth for women in the poorest households, by 9.1%, but not for women in the middle or richest households. Further, racially minoritised women across income categories were much more likely to live in local authorities that suffered substantial cuts. Although austerity policies may not have directly restricted people’s biological capacity to conceive, our findings show that local government austerity cuts unequally restricted the right to have children.