Governing Reproduction: The Political Economy of Gestational Labor

What kind of activity are pregnant people performing when they become pregnant, gestate a pregnancy, and, if the pregnancy progresses to that stage, give birth? This paper employs the concept of gestational labour to make sense of this activity and operationalizes it for the purposes of political economic analyses. I argue that gestational labour can be conceptualized in terms of four types of labour: emotional, hermeneutic, cognitive, and bodily labour. To demonstrate the usefulness of employing the concept of gestational labour in analyses of political and economic governance, and of this specific operationalisation of the concept, I use it to analyse controversies and critiques in the public debate about the conditions for making children in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare state that is well-known for its investment in childcare, but which has received increasing criticism from pregnant people for the conditions of gestational labour provided by the state. The paper contributes to deepening our understanding of the nature of gestation as labour.