A seven-point manifesto for gestational justice

Societies have a legitimate interest in reproduction. Without new citizens, our communities, cultures and ultimately our species would perish. But gestation and childbirth are dangerous. Countless women have suffered and died in giving birth to the babies that perpetuate our species.

Women in the past had babies not simply because they longed for children, but also because they had no choice. This remains so for hundreds of millions of women today who live in reproductive servitude. The places suffering from low birthrates are those where women get to choose. In these contexts, insufficient babies are born to satisfy the demographic, ideological and economic needs of their societies.

The answer favoured by right-wing extremists is obvious: usher the women back to the bedroom, kitchen, brothel... to fulfil the roles for which nature ordained them. A woman in the workplace is an abomination; no wonder her reproductive organs sour and wither as her maternal inclinations are subsumed by sterile boardroom machinations.

We can no longer reassure ourselves that these are the views of a few eccentrics. They are becoming mainstream. Yet the usual counter-arguments are mired in optimistic self-deceptions about the impediments that modern life places to the fulfilment of women's reproductive aspirations. Career worries, educational and financial pressures, the lack of suitable husband material.... These are the things we need to address.

But wait – are these impediments really a product of modern life? No! Women have always suffered from the clash between reproductive and other activities, from men's fecklessness, and from the desperate grind of poverty. Are the women who have the most babies today the ones who found perfect husbands, whose maternal vs other social activities came into exquisite balance, or whose financial wellbeing and independence enabled them to have the large families they desire? Quite the reverse.

The supposed impediments to women's natural maternal fulfilment that get the blame for low birthrates in many Western societies (bad husbands, poverty, other values in tension with motherhood) are also present in societies where birthrates are high. These phenomena are not new. They are as old as humanity itself.

The factor that sets low-birthrate societies apart from those with high birthrates is terribly simple: it is women's ability to choose.

In failing to acknowledge this, even well-meaning and otherwise benign commentators rely on the same underlying assumptions as the right-wing faction, dressed up in a less obviously fascist guise and without the gleeful anticipation of a world where real work is only done by real men. That is, women – given the chance – naturally long to have more babies. A deficit must therefore indicate something wrong with society, something thwarting this natural and wholesome urge.

But what if the urge doesn't exist? All that was necessary in the past to secure the continued production of babies was the urge for sex, and absence of contraception. The idea that there is some kind of evolutionary drive that specifically impels women to have babies lacks any kind of evidential basis. It is a straw that people clutch at in order to avoid having to think what it means for society when women no longer produce enough babies. The assumption that women are biologically programmed to want babies is not only false; it also blocks our ability to assess the situation in an ethically sound, sober and honest way.

In order to address this, it is necessary to think about gestational justice. Why gestational? Because it is women (or those with gestational capacity) who are treated as the 'bottleneck' that impedes the production of babies. It is women whose ability to choose has sent fertility rates plummeting. And it is women whose bodies do the work of gestation. All of the other work involved in reproduction and childrearing is, or can be, distributed among the population.

Only a subset of the population can gestate and give birth to babies. This group is characterised by an unchosen biological attribute – gestational capacity. Why should such a group be regarded as responsible for resolving population deficits for societies that fail to recognise or acknowledge the sacrifices this entails?

Suppose for a moment that we lived in a world where people with red hair are assumed to have a powerful urge to fight fires. We rely on their heroism, and benefit from it. But then redheads start to pursue other goals, resulting in a lack of firefighters. Should we cajole and castigate redheads for putting education before their firefighting role? Tell them this is what they were born for? Assume they've made terrible mistakes in their priorities? Ridiculous, right? Yet this is how we treat recalcitrant gestators... AKA women.

It is time that this changed. It is a mistake to suppose that societies have no legitimate interests in reproduction, but since these legitimate interests require the bodily involvement of a specific population, they raise questions of justice (see my chapter Ectogenesis or Gestational Justice? in the book Ectogestation and the Future of Reproductive Rights).

Gestational justice arises from four key facts in conjunction with three moral principles:

• Reproduction is not just important to prospective parents, but to society at large.
• Reproduction necessarily relies on the bodies of gestators.
• Only a proportion of the population has the capacity to gestate.
• Gestational capacity is a) unchosen; b) associated with historical and current oppression; and c) entails significant physical risk.

These four facts mean that those deemed to have gestational capacity are vulnerable to coercion, manipulation and exploitation in societies that lack a concept of gestational justice. Accordingly, the following principles are needed to redress this vulnerability:

• No one owes their body to the state, their partner, or their family.
• Those who stand to benefit from others' gestational capacity have no right to, or claim on, the bodies of citizens who happen to have that capacity.
• Gestation is a supererogatory activity: it may be morally valuable but cannot be owed to others simply because one happens to have the biological capacity for it.

Together, these seven points provide the foundation for gestational justice.