The Governance of Reproduction

In February of 2024, President Emanuel Macron called for a ‘demographic rearmament’ whereby he announced a plan in which people aged 25 and above will be offered a fertility check. Similar calls to action for the people to step up and replenish the nation have been uttered by other national leaders during recent years, such as Erna Solberg, the former Prime Minister of Norway, calling for people to have more babies in her annual New Year’s speech in 2019. This paper explores what the feminist political economy scholarship, which is used to approach reproduction through the lens of social reproduction, gains by homing in on biological reproduction. It goes on to outline the concept of ‘reproductive governance,’ proposed by anthropologists Lynn Morgan and Elizabeth Roberts (2012), and to explain how this concept helps us better make sense of the governance of reproduction and reproductive bodies in political economy.