In April 2023, the BBC reported that Calpol was the item most likely to be stolen from supermarkets in a deprived part of London (Warren and Gregory 2023). Calpol is paracetamol (acetaminophen) for children, a saccharine pink liquid used to treat fevers, teething, and symptoms of a common cold. This news was upsetting but not surprising. At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is in economic crisis. A surge in inflation, caused by “spectacular increases in energy prices,” has produced a dramatic reduction in living standards (Cribb et al. 2023, 3). Low-income households have been hardest hit: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reports that “3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022” (Fitzpatrick et al. 2023, 2).
Rising destitution cannot be attributed to inflation alone, however. Long before energy prices soared, successive Conservative-led governments pursued “austerity” measures with “widespread, acute, and devastating” effect (Hall 2022b, 299). As the rise in Calpol theft suggests, families with children were heavily affected. Rates of relative child poverty in the general population rose from 27 percent in 2013 to 31 percent in 2019, while child poverty in families with three or more children rose from 30 percent in 2013 to 38 percent in 2019 (Cribb et al. 2022). Relatedly, research demonstrates that austerity measures may cause (potential) parents to delay and derail their plans for children, whilst radically altering the conditions within which they sustain families (Hall 2022b, 2023). Welfare reform played a significant part in shaping this context.
The “two-child limit” is one such reform. This policy restricts the number of children for whom a low-income family can claim the “child element” of “Universal Credit” to two. Universal Credit is the government’s flagship social security policy: a working-age benefit available to “households” in the United Kingdom. The child element of Universal Credit, designed to mitigate the costs of raising children, is worth over £3,000 per year, per child. In justifying the two-child limit, David Cameron’s Conservative government stressed the financial vulnerabilities of the state, and a desire to equalize the reproductive opportunities of “working” and “non-working” families, such that they are “fair” (Her Majesty’s Treasury and Department of Work and Pensions 2015). As I will demonstrate, these justifications echoed a pre-existing, hegemonic anti-natalist, anti-welfare discourse, while intensifying the formal focus on the fertility of a poor and peripherized population. At the time of writing, this policy remains unchanged despite a recent shift in government (from Conservative to Labour), and a fresh wave of calls for reform (cf. Patrick 2024).
In this article, I evaluate the reproductive politics of the two-child limit. Specifically, I synthesize existing empirical research, and formal policy discourse, to explore how the measure functions as a form of reproductive governance (Morgan and Roberts 2012). I read the limit as a “technology of discipline”; a state intervention designed to shape the “body politic,” and its internal reproductive dynamics. I begin by interpreting extant empirical research via a lens of reproductive governance, highlighting how the two-child limit stratifies reproductive opportunities, and shapes the reproductive lives of large families in a low-income context. I argue that the limit works to abandon intersectionally marginalized women and their children, pushing them to the periphery of the political sphere. When read in tandem with the government’s stated aims, this result appears to indicate policy “failure.” To ascertain the validity of this assessment, however, it is necessary to explore the policy’s logic in depth. From a Foucauldian perspective, discipline is more than state intervention per se, it is also “a radical construction of an idealized reality that runs parallel to everyday life” (Nilsson 2013, 20). Thus, to assign “meaning” to disciplinary effects, we must identify disciplinary rationales.
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