The effects of COVID-19 on imagined reproductive futures

Abstract

AbstractMacro-level crises affect individual lives and behaviors. One of COVID-19’s many effects was to disrupt the way people imagined their own and their children’s’ futures or imagined reproductive futures. Using 65 interviews collected between March and July 2020 with mothers who experienced pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period at the onset of COVID-19 in the US, this study examines two elements of reproduction and futurity; first, how the pandemic exacerbated health, economic, racial, and global emergency stressors to create unique reproductive experiences and nuanced imagined reproductive futures. Second, I use Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism amidst COVID-19 to inquire whether reproduction maintains a compulsory sense of optimism amidst periods of social disruption. I find that despite the various stressors and in addition to the shared disruption of the pandemic, there remains a widespread maternal optimism about reproduction across birthing people with different intersectional social identities. Diverse imaginations of futurity are likely to impact reproductive practices and the meaning-making associated with them; in this research, I use maternal subjectivities to illustrate how narratives and experiences of reproduction are contextual, and offer a distinct avenue toward theoretical analyses of futurity.