‘You feel like a second class citizen’: UK family bordering policies through the lens of reproductive justice

This paper considers family bordering policies through the lens of reproductive justice, exploring the ways in which these policies unevenly impact upon migrant women’s experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood. As V. Spike Peterson (2021) points out, the heterosexual nuclear family is both a site in which the nation-state is literally reproduced, and also through which gendered and racialised hierarchies of belonging and citizenship are legitimated (see also Turner 2020). The codification of the heterosexual nuclear family as the ‘correct’ model was critical to the establishment of the gendered public/private divide central to liberal citizenship (Pateman 1989). Similarly, claims that this model of the family was ‘superior’ figured centrally in the racialisation of colonised and enslaved persons, and the concomitant association of Britishness with whiteness. Bordering processes reflect these discourses, disciplining family forms and practices along racialised, gendered, and heteronormative lines. This bordering of the family, and the role of the family in the reproduction of the nation-state, has material consequences for migrants’ experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant mothers, I argue that, while national maternity policy emphasises the importance of ‘family’ for a healthy and safe pregnancy and birth, bordering processes serve to limit (some) pregnant migrants’ access to familial support, with consequences for these migrants’ emotional and physical wellbeing. These harms are unevenly distributed, particularly affecting those migrants whose family forms and practices do not conform to the white, heteronormative, norm.