Austerity as reproductive injustice: did local authority spending cuts in England have unequal effects on fertility by class and race?

Qualitative research and Black feminist scholarship have linked austerity cuts in the UK to constraints on Reproductive Justice and infringements to the right to have children and the right to parent in safe and healthy environments, particularly for poorer and racialised communities. However, the stratified impact of public funding cuts on the probability of having a(nother) birth by class and race remains unclear. In this paper, we operationalise austerity at the Local Authority level, exploiting variation in the extent and speed of council funding cuts in England, between 2009 and 2019. Using Understanding Society data and a within-between random effects model, we examine how cuts to council funding differentially affected the probability of having a(nother) birth across different income and racialised groups, between 2009 and 2019. Preliminary findings indicate that cuts in funding within Local Authorities had a statistically significant negative effect on the poorest tercile’s probability of having a(nother) birth, but not on the middle or richest terciles. This effect is substantively large, corresponding to a 20% decrease in the probability of having a(nother) birth. We also conduct intersectional analyses by income and: racialised category and citizenship status. Results demonstrate that austerity had highly socially patterned effects, affecting the fertility of the most intersectionally disadvantaged groups the most. This paper provides convincing evidence that local council funding cuts had reproductively unjust effects.