Austerity as reproductive injustice: did local government spending cuts unequally impact births?

Abstract Large local government spending cuts in England, spanning over a decade of austerity policies, have severely restricted the universal services and public goods that constitute the environments within which parenting occurs. Drawing on the Reproductive Justice (RJ) framework and conceptualizing spending cuts as restricting the right to parent in safe and healthy environments, we ask whether these cuts constrained people’s right to have children. To do so, we introduce a new quantitative approach for “thinking with” RJ. Using nationally representative UK Household Longitudinal Study data and a within-between random effects model, we analyze whether local government spending cuts were associated with intersectional inequalities in childbearing over the 2010–2020 period. We find that local government spending cuts were associated with a 9.1 percent reduction in the probability of having a(nother) birth for women in the poorest households, but not for women in the middle or richest households. Further, racially minoritized women across income categories were much more likely to live in local authorities that experienced substantial cuts. Our findings support the claim that local government austerity cuts unequally restricted the right to have children amongst the most disadvantaged.