Abstract
In September 2025, the largest far-right rally in the history of the United Kingdom took place in London, followed by an escalation of racist violence and the targeting of asylum accommodation across the country. The spectre of population, epitomised by claims that Britain is becoming “minority white,” was repeatedly evoked to propel racist, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant attacks (Fekete, 2025). Key to these demographic anxieties are reproductive anxieties centred on discourses around which social groups should or should not have children, who should be allowed to cross borders and who should be restricted from doing so. Such a hierarchical valuation of lives – shaped by race, border and migration strategies – is encompassed in the expansive analytic “reproductive racism” which sociologist and political scientist Susanne Schultz develops in this book. The book is comprised of six chapters divided into four parts – “Blaming ‘Population’ for Multiple Crises,” “Projecting Migration: Dangerous Statistical Narratives,” “Averting Births: Political Economy and Statehood” and “Resisting: Reproductive Justice” – followed by an epilogue.
In the first part, Schultz argues that laying the ground for reproductive racism is the concept of “demographization”. She defines it as the process of redefining social, political and ecological problems as demographic issues, which “makes it possible for almost all social conflicts to be translated into demographic problems” and to obscure systemic issues (p. 17). While Chapter 1 (“Exploring the Multidimensional Concept of Demographization: The Case of Germany”) is based on family and migration politics in Germany in the 2000s and 2010s, its findings are corroborated by the normalisation of demographisation in the present day, from concerns around “overpopulation” used to justify restrictive borders across Europe to mass-shooters pushing the great replacement theory to its most extreme ends (Davey and Ebner, 2019).
In the second part of the book, Schultz unpacks the production of seemingly “neutral” demographic knowledge and how it feeds into governing strategies in Germany. The author reveals how demographic data (on birth rates, death rates, migration patterns) is often shaped by opaque assumptions whereby exaggerated future projections are presented as objective facts. In Chapter 2 (“Demographic Futurity: On the Power of Statistical Assumption Politics”), Schultz examines the circulation of statistics about future immigration rates in Germany during the 2015 so-called “migration crisis”. Therefore, as Schultz argues, “Questioning demographic rationalities is necessary at all these political levels in order to contest political strategies which translate unequal relations of distribution and power into issues of human resources and population” (p. 91). While Chapters 1 and 2 are complex and dense, perhaps more accessible to those with a grounding in theoretical concepts such as biopolitics, they importantly lay out the theoretical terrain for the analysis that follows.
Central to the focus on demography in Germany’s migration policy debates is statistics and narratives around the fertility of migrant women, which Schultz shows is often the basis of racist alarmism about the future. In Chapter 3 (“‘Too High’ or ‘Too Low’? Segregated Migrants’ Birth Rates as Common Ground for Völkisch and Utilitarian Nationalisms”), Schultz shows how migrant fertility is either posited as “too much” and therefore a threat to ethnic homogeneity, or as “too little” to counter the country’s demographic aging and a declining birth rate. In addition to highlighting the issues around speculative long-term population projections, Schultz shows how such narratives create long-term reproductive genealogies which “treat immigrants and their descendants as a continuously separate population” and therefore can function “as a reifying statistical strategy for policies of segregation and exclusion” (p. 85). Such segregated genealogies normalise the notion that a generation of Germans reproduces itself separately from a generation of immigrated people, further cementing the othering of migrant communities and laying the ground for racist and nationalist ideologies. Schultz further shows that while there is a hyperfocus on migrant women’s reproductive patterns (Schultz highlights the obvious but overlooked point that data on men is often neglected in demographic research, further inscribing gender norms), the desires, wishes and motivations of migrant women are entirely absent, turning them into “subjectless others” (p. 87). Hence, Chapter 3 serves as an important intervention which offers “an intersectional theoretical framework for analyzing racialized policies of reproduction” (p. xi), providing readers with the analytical tools needed to contest the ways in which the fertility of migrant women is reified and used to fuel racist ideologies.
The third part of the book is devoted to antinatalism. The creation of “subjectless others” is perhaps most apparent in antinatalist policies pursued in the Global South, where international population agencies, philanthrocapitalist foundations and Big Pharma companies work to expand contraceptive markets. Chapter 4, (“Transnational Antinatalism: Simplistic Narratives and Big Pharma Interests”), co-written with Daniel Bendix, shows how, despite demographic targets and quotas being officially delegitimised after the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, birth reduction continues to be posited as the solution to global poverty, a classic example of neo-malthusianism which blames the poor and their children for the world’s economic and environmental crises. Particularly useful is this chapter’s political economy of “transnational antinatalism,” defined as the organisations, activities and strategies that transcend national boundaries and aim at reducing the number of births. The authors show how a return to simplistic demographic explanations provides a favourable climate for pharmaceutical companies to expand contraceptive markets. While the authors identify critical research and resistance that exists in specific locations, they draw attention to a weakness in transnational networking and international solidarity on issues such as the booming markets for implants and other long-term contraceptives, posing a challenge for reproductive justice activists today. Chapter 5 uses a state theoretical approach to explore the role of feminist and environmental NGOs on transnational politics, with reference to the history of women’s reproductive health movements.
The last part of the book explores forms of resistance. The framework of reproductive justice is one such mobilising tool through which Black feminist movements are fighting back against anti-natalist strategies, population control and the stigmatisation of forms of parenthood, as explored in the final chapter of the book, (“Intersectional Convivialities: Brazilian Black and Popular Feminist Approaches to the Justiça Reprodutive Framework”). Based on fieldwork conducted in Brazil in 2021 with activists of Black feminist groups whose words are weaved throughout, Chapter 6 is incredibly rich and engaging to read. It was particularly insightful to learn how reproductive justice, which integrates the right to decide against having children; the right to decide to have children; and the right to raise children in good social and ecological conditions and free from institutional and personal violence (p. 153), has been adopted in specific ways in Brazil and builds upon historical movements against mass sterilisation in the 1990s and resistance campaigns of mothers against police violence. The arguments made in this chapter open the door for further situated research into anti-racist feminist movements around the world, how they organise in their local contexts and possibilities for wider solidarity.
One of the most important contributions of the book, as explored in the final chapter, is how Black feminist activists in Brazil are building a systemic analysis of reproductive relations that challenges the “necropolitical dimensions of population policies” (p. 165). The need to resist individualisation is one of the critiques levelled at intersectionality as a concept, which can be interpreted as a segregated way of addressing different positionalities and ultimately reifying social categories. However, Schultz shows how Black feminists in Brazil are expanding the concept of intersectionality by thinking in a more reflective, collective and less fixed way. This approach involves a will to “learn together about entangled forms of oppression and rethink their collective political positionality” (p. 175) in order to build a more unified analysis which can address daily needs on an individual level while also building towards transformative futures for all. The insights in this chapter offer a fascinating exploration of how social movements adopt and transform theoretical concepts in order to respond to entangled inequalities – but also, I would add, how activist struggles forge their own lived theories. In the words of one quoted interlocutor, “we learn from the coexistence of bodies . . . we are not academics. We don’t want to research women, we want to learn from them and write and speak from their perspective” (p. 173).
While I felt this book would have benefitted from further links made across the chapters in order to help readers to tease out the connections between the sections and the different local, national and transnational contexts covered, the book makes an important contribution to a wide range of fields including sociology, gender studies, migration, political science and international development. Scholar-activists engaged with understanding the workings of reproductive politics, migration, intersectionality, coloniality, political economy and statehood will find much value in Schultz’s illuminating lens, which provides the tools to understand our present moment in order to work towards changing it.
