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Law in Contemporary Society
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Capitalizing the Womb: Exploitation of Reproductive Labor through Healthcare-- By VelenWu - 19 Feb 2025 I. Reproductive Labor as Capital A woman’s reproductive system is perhaps the single most valuable thing for society’s productivity, for it enables the continuation of the labor force. In its pursuit of profit maximization and cost minimization, capitalism has staked a legitimate interest in controlling the womb as territory for accumulation (Romanis, 2020). As a result, throughout history, women’s reproductive labor has defined our purpose—and duty—in a capitalistic society: to bear and raise children. Curiously, however, as Marx observed in Capital, the sexual division of labor—a characteristic of patriarchal societies—existed prior to capitalism and did not emerge for the first time during primitive accumulation (Murillo, 2021). This then begs the question: how did capitalism reconstitute this pre-existing patriarchal structure to facilitate its exploitation of reproductive labor and how is such a system sustained? I argue that capitalism adapted pre-existing patriarchial home relationships to alienate reproductive labor, thus setting it up for capitalist exploitation, which is perpetuated by a healthcare system that simultaneously ensures the viability of women’s reproductive systems while exerting oppressive pressures that thwart empowerment. II. Capitalism’s Reconfiguration of Patriarchal Structures Capitalism’s adaptation of the pre-existing patriarchal familial relationships and structures revolved around the disposition of the “family unit.” Vogel asserts that the role of the working class family shifted “from an overriding preoccupation with the internal structure and dynamics of this family form to its structural relation to the reproduction of capital” (Ferguson, 2013). It follows that the family unit is then no longer an isolated social unit; rather, it is connected to larger economic structures—embedded within and in service of the capitalist system. By placing the internal family structure in the context of capitalism, the pre-existing sexual division of labor is transformed into a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. Marx’s analysis of capitalism frames “productive” labor narrowly as work that generates exchange value (Murillo, 2021). By definition, this excludes reproductive labor such as child care, child-rearing, and housework. The alienation of household chores and family responsibilities from professional engagements relegated women's reproductive labor to a secondary position in the labor market (Lin, 2023). As reproductive labor became seen as “naturally” occurring rather than deserving of compensation, it sustained the workforce and thereby drove capitalistic production at no expense to the capitalist. During the slave trade, Partus Sequitur Ventrum provided that a child would follow the status of their mother. In 1662, the Black woman’s body was legally codified as the site where more slaves were produced (Tuner, 2017). Enslaved women’s children were “counted… in slaveholding ledgers as property and future workers” (Turner, 2017). This, in turn, facilitated the reproduction of the slave labor force to maintain the institution of slavery, allowing slaveowners to capitalize on both the enslaved woman’s physical and reproductive labor. In the modern-day context, the coerced sterilization of immigrant women and the overturn of Roe are stark reminders that women remain procreators first and autonomous beings last. III. The Medicalization and Neglect of Women’s Bodies Given that “the maintenance … of the working class [is] a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital” (Humphries, 1977), the health of women’s bodies became a necessity for perpetuating oppression. The healthcare system enforces the exploitation of reproductive labor through two complementary mechanisms. On one hand, investing in the health of women’s reproductive system is necessary to ensure the viability and continuation of reproductive labor; on the other hand, the neglect of holistic care acts as an oppressive pressure to hinder female empowerment—a force that threatens the exploitation of reproductive labor. Historically, medical knowledge about female biology has been centered on safeguarding women’s capacity to reproduce. Her illnesses and diseases are consistently related to the “secrets” and “curiosities” of her reproductive organs (Cleghorn, 2021). For example, in his 1895 obstetrics textbook, Dr. A.F.A. King, an Obstetrics Professor. assured his male medical students that “it is not necessary to obtain verbal consent… before instituting the [pelvic] examination,” analogizing it to taking a pulse (King, 1889). On its face, the medical focus on women’s reproductive systems ensures that women’s bodies are healthy sites for capital extraction. More systematically, viewing women’s bodies as grounds for economic production, “the state… has had to resort to regulation and coercion to expand or reduce the workforce” (Pope, 2024); and healthcare, as the most proximate tool for regulating women’s bodies, became a means for exerting such control. Simultaneously, the neglect of other aspects of women’s health consolidates capitalism’s grip over women’s reproductive labor by distancing them from empowerment. For example, women with chest pain had a 29% longer wait time for heart attack evaluation than men (eClinicalMedicine, 2024). Similarly, women are less likely than men to be prescribed pain-relief medications for the same complaints (Guzikevits, 2024). Such gender disparity is present not only in diagnosis but throughout the healthcare system—from research (70% of patients with chronic pain are women, but 80% of pain studies are conducted on male mice or human men) (Epker, 2023) to cultural bias (women’s pain is more likely to be seen as having a psychological cause instead of a biological one) (Bever, 2022). To this end, the healthcare system has been programmed to hamper women’s access to proper care. Since healthcare plays a critical role in the empowerment theory’s core goal of “gain[ing] mastery over their lives,” stripping women of care confines them to exploitation. IV. Path Forward Healthcare in a capitalist system is seen not as a right, but as a commodity. Thus, solely imposing demands or forcing change on the healthcare system itself may be feeble in uprooting its role in the exploitation of reproductive labor. Instead, by revealing and influencing the values and epistemic dispositions that underlie the healthcare system, we can dismantle, bit by bit, the specific mechanisms through which it supports the man-made capitalist system. This requires women’s voices and testimonies to be heard and believed—not just on its face, but within the history of how the world around her came to be and how the systems and mechanisms that confined her came to exist. Works Cited Bever, Lindsey. “From Heart Disease to IUDs: How Doctors Dismiss Women’s Pain.” The Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2022/women-pain-gender-bias-doctors/. Cleghorn, Elinor. “The Long History of Gender Bias in Medicine.” Time, Time, 17 June 2021, time.com/6074224/gender-medicine-history/. eClinicalMedicine. “Gendered pain: A call for recognition and health equity.” eClinicalMedicine, vol. 69, Mar. 2024, p. 102558, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102558. Epker, Eva. “Being a Woman Doesn’t Have to Be a (Chronic) Pain.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 7 Apr. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/evaepker/2023/04/05/why-is-being-a-woman-a-chronic-pain/. Ferguson, Susan, and David McNally? . “Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations: Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women.”Marxism and the Oppression of Women, by Lise Vogel, Brill, 2013, pp. xxiv. Guzikevits, Mika, et al. “Sex bias in pain management decisions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 33, 5 Aug. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401331121. Humphries, Jane. “Class struggle and the persistence of the working-class family.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 1, no. 3, Sept. 1977, pp. 241–258. King, A. F. A. A Manual of Obstetrics, Lea Brothers, 1889, pp. 167–167. Lin, Jinlong, and Yang Wang. “Back to marx: Reflections on the feminist crisis at the crossroads of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, no. 1, 14 Dec. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02341-2. Murillo, Celeste D’Atri, and Andrea D’Atri. “Producing and Reproducing: Capitalism’s Dual Oppression of Women.” Left Voice, 25 May 2021, www.leftvoice.org/on-reproductive-labor-wage-slavery-and-the-new-working-class/. Pope, Audrey, et al. “SisterSong v. State of Georgia: A Feminist History and Tradition? |.” Harvard Law Review, 16 Dec. 2024, harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/12/sistersong-v-state-of-georgia-a-feminist-history-and-tradition/. Romanis, Elizabeth Chloe, et al. “Reviewing the womb.” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 47, no. 12, 29 July 2020, pp. 820–829, https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106160. Turner, Sasha. “The Invisible Threads of Gender, Race, and Slavery.” AAIHS, 22 June 2017, www.aaihs.org/the-invisible-threads-of-gender-race-and-slavery/.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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