Since becoming a parent, I no longer have much time. There are 4,524 unread emails in my inbox, and I only recently got a pedicure despite the fact that it’s been at least 13 months since I’ve been able to see my feet again. But it turns out that I do have time to be properly livid with the Labour party, which is refusing to budge on its failure to promise to scrap the two-child benefits policy, despite the fact that it has pushed a quarter of a million children into poverty and 850,000 even deeper below the breadline.
Perhaps it’s tone deaf to talk of pedicures in the same breath as child poverty, but these small things mothers do for themselves – getting our roots done, or even just a long, hot bath – help us stay sane. The toll that parenting takes on your body doesn’t stop after birth: it is physical, bone-aching work, and birth of course can lead to myriad long-term health issues. These small acts of self-care matter; they make us feel worth something.
They are also the first things to go in times of financial hardship. We all make sacrifices for our children’s wellbeing to different extents, and in a cost of living crisis money for such things might be needed elsewhere. Pedicures are the least of it: there will be many women going hungry in this country today so that their children can eat.
The effects of the two-child policy, which limits benefits to the first two children born into a family, have been widely and rightly condemned. The bitter internal row in the Labour party over this especially cruel and nasty legislation shows what an emotive issue it is.
It goes without saying that punishing innocent children for their parents’ apparent reproductive profligacy is a heinous political strategy. And for what? It hasn’t even worked. The social policy professor Jonathan Bradshaw has called it “morally odious” and worse than the 1834 legislation that brought workhouses into existence. Considering how that policy broke up families, starved children and essentially warehoused “undesirables” in a way the Nazis would later replicate, that is quite a strong statement.
But what is less discussed, and which I can’t stop thinking about, is its impact on the female body. Philip Alston, the UN’s then rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said that the UK’s benefits system was so sexist that it might as well have been conceived by “a group of misogynists in a room” determined to make a system that works for men and not women. There was, rightly, outrage about the “rape clause” in this policy that requires that women who have had a third child as a result of rape prove it to the government in order to claim for benefits, but less about the fact that the reproductive rights of every single woman in the UK have been quietly encroached upon.
Essentially what we have here is the legislating of the female body, in plain sight, yet with none of the outrage and fury that we see over abortion rights. In forcing women to choose between abortion and poverty, the policy appears specifically designed to limit women’s reproductive choices. But because, I suspect, societal ideas about working-class maternal fecklessness are so ingrained, even people who consider themselves socially progressive might um and ah when asked their views on women on benefits reproducing.
And so there are no marches. Two years ago, two single mothers and their children valiantly challenged the legislation in court on the basis that it was discriminatory, but they lost. (It was noted in the coverage that one of the mothers had become pregnant despite being on the pill and that the other was in low-paid work: ie, they were the “right sort” of single mothers). In the judgment the supreme court president, Lord Reed, said that while the policy had a disproportionate impact on women, parliament had decided that was outweighed by the importance of its economic aims. How chilling I find that sentence. How chilling we should all find it.
But as my own (single) mother frequently says: “‘Twas ever thus”. Our bodies are under the bus, again, and scarcely anyone seems to care. They are, I suppose, the wrong sorts of bodies: poor bodies, black and brown bodies (the policy disproportionally affects women of colour), disabled bodies. Even if your body is none of these things, and you’re one of the women getting monthly pedicures, it is a dangerous precedent that has been set; and in the spirit of maternal – nay, female – solidarity, we should all abhor it.
As Sian Norris, the author of Bodies Under Siege, tells me: “The two-child policy seeks to legislate over women’s bodies, treating women’s wombs as something that can and should be arbitrated on by the state. It ties into ideas of women’s wombs being public property, which in turn links to anti-abortion ideology – ironic considering the policy is pushing some women to terminate wanted pregnancies as they can’t afford to care for a third or fourth child.”
She added: “There is a specific class-based element to this that states that if you are on a low-income, then you are not entitled to make your own decisions about pregnancy, fertility and your family.”
A Labour party without the moral courage to challenge this policy is unworthy of the name. Set against the background of demographic panic about the birthrate, its stance is even more nonsensical. The birthrate is plummeting, and women are ending wanted pregnancies.
In 2020 the British Pregnancy Advisory Service noted that since the policy was introduced, the proportion of abortions to women with two or more children had risen by 16.4%. They’re the wrong sort of women to be having babies, though. We don’t want migrant or impoverished mothers, and we don’t want their children, who, if they have the audacity to exist, must be punished. We want only the right sort. ‘Twas ever thus.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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