Our ruling class, like ruling classes throughout history, cares intensely about how many kids we have and how much it will cost them. If we continue to think of the establishment as a neutral arbiter, and the abortion fight as a squabble between ordinary people, we’ll miss what is really at stake. The ruling class would love for us to fight among ourselves, leaving their exploitation of our reproductive work invisible. It’s our job to make it visible and a site of struggle, demanding not just free abortion and contraception, but also the resources we need to raise safe, healthy, and happy kids.

The United States is a particularly hostile environment for parenting. Workers face long hours, inadequate pay, unreliable health care, overpriced housing, paltry unpaid leave, and childcare that can eat a whole paycheck. As a result, the US birth rate is now at a record low of 1.64 children per woman, considerably below replacement.

When Western Europe faced dramatic declines in births in the 1970s, governments instituted universal childcare, long paid family leaves (up to a year), and substantial child allowance checks, on top of free health care. But in the United States, the working class has little political representation, so the costs of bearing and rearing children are largely borne by families. Instead of support, we have faced a cheaper, meaner pronatalism: reproductive coercion.

Paul Heideman argued recently that the corporate class is unconcerned about the birth rate, and that abortion is essentially a fight between ordinary people. In fact, business interests have a huge stake in the outcome of reproductive politics. The fight over abortion is a fight over the labor of reproducing society — and barriers to reproductive control have always been about exploiting this work.

Heideman is right that low birth rates don’t decrease labor supply or increase wages in the short run, something Karl Marx pointed out in the 1860s. But capitalists absolutely have a long-term class interest in an increasing US population. The Financial Times ran a five-part “Baby Bust,” series in April. Just this month, a front-page FT headline blared: “Lowest global population growth since 1950 raises economy fears.” Two-thirds of the world lives in countries with below-replacement birth rates, the story noted, and Europe’s population is now shrinking. “Unless you get a productivity miracle,” Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics told the paper, “overall economic growth will fall.” And William Galston of the Brookings Institution claims that in the United States, “the principal driver of slow growth since 2008 has been a sharp slowdown in the growth of the labor supply.”

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