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

Publication type

Journal Article

Series Number

Authors

Publication date

November 27, 2025

Summary:

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.

Published in

Social Forces

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf198

ISSN

00377732

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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