Reproduction and the Expanding Border: Pregnant Migrants as a ‘Problem’ in the 2014 Immigration Act

Abstract

This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.

Pregnant racialised migrants and the ubiquitous border: The hostile environment as a technology of stratified reproduction

“…The reproductive stratification produced by the hostile environment can be read as an aspect of the wider racialised biopolitics of UK citizenship analysed by Tyler (2010) . Discourses and practices mark out racialised migrant women as an outsider population whose reproductive practices are threatening to the state, and must therefore be disciplined ( Erel, 2018 ; Erel et al, 2018 ; Gedalof, 2007 ; Lonergan, 2018 , 2023 ; Tyler, 2010 ; Yuval-Davis et al, 2005 ). Reproductive stratification thus emerges as deeply intertwined with citizenship, and with strategies to demarcate and control certain populations as ‘failed’ citizens.…”

“…As Tyler (2010) argues, the abolition of jus soli citizenship (whereby anyone born on a country's territory automatically becomes a citizen of that country) by the 1981 Nationality Act means that maternity wards are now sites where an alien population is introduced to the UK. This has contributed to the construction of (racialised) pregnant migrants as a target of hostile environment policies (Lonergan, 2023). Immigration policies additionally determine on what terms migrant families, or families with migrant members, can live together in a country; they also often differentially distribute access to welfare state resources necessary for reproductive tasks (Bonizzoni, 2011;Gedalof, 2007;Humphris, 2017;Lonergan, 2018).…”

Reading for refusal in UK maternity care: entangling struggles for border and reproductive justice

“…The change in ordinary residency was accompanied by a discursive reframing of some visaholders from 'ordinarily resident' to 'temporary migrant' (Lonergan 2023). This shift enabled the UK government to introduce an Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), which entitles holders of visas of over six months to free NHS care with some exemptions (including fertility treatment).…”

“…Therefore, women's experiences of engaging in the rules set out by the British state are unjust. State rules intended to protect them do not function in practice because border securitisation is always prioritised over women's health and safety (Lonergan 2023). In these ways, exemptions intended to give women access not only to free care but also safe living conditions become inaccessible because of the barriers to providing evidence but also of being believed even when evidence is provided.…”