The effects of COVID-19 on imagined reproductive futures

Abstract Macro-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.