“Every miscarriage is a work accident”: Theorising miscarriage through a labour lens

This article explores the potentials of a materialist approach to miscarriage, taking Silvia Federici's provocation that ‘every miscarriage is a work accident’ as a catalyst. It is fifty years since Federici wrote this line in her renowned ‘Wages Against Housework’ manifesto, yet miscarriage has never been given full systematic analysis within the Wages for Housework theoretical corpus, nor the broader field of social reproduction theory. After surveying accounts of pregnancy as ‘gestational labour’ or ‘work’ under capitalism from the 1970s and 80s to the present, this article suggests that the marginalisation of miscarriage within this body of work stems in part from the centrality of refusal as an organising concept , which is not obviously applicable to miscarriage as an involuntary form of pregnancy-ending. However, the article also examines the possibilities of theorising miscarriage through a materialist labour lens, arguing it can enable greater insight into the capitalist social relations and logics of productivity that shape contemporary experiences and understandings of miscarriage. Moreover, it can prompt deeper analysis of the grossly unequal material conditions in which pregnancy-endings play out, as determined by the contradictory needs of capitalist social reproduction. Labour-focused accounts of miscarriage, I argue, can thus make an important contribution to feminist analyses of stratified reproduction and Reproductive Justice theory and activism more broadly.