Who Might Give Birth to Citizens? Reproductive Justice, Temporality and Family Immigration Regime
Emphasising key aspects of family making within a restrictive immigration regime, this paper explores the impact of intersecting temporalities in migratory paperwork and citizenship status on reproductive (in-)justice for mixed status families in Denmark. This study is based primarily on semi-structured interviews with pregnant women living in mixed citizenship status families (all self-identified as women), and extensive participant observations within a legal advisory service (2014-23). The conceptual framework is informed by feminist STS and critical migration studies
The conflicts and conflations between bureaucratic and biographic temporalities within Danish family reunification policies raise questions about the imaginary of the national population, as one member in the relationship may be privileged by their national citizenship status, and therefore already considered a part of the social fabric, and desirable national citizen to reproduce the nation-state, whereas the other is perceived as the migrant-other, often associated with the racist idea of ‘hyper-fertility’. This paper argues anti-immigration family reunification policy can be viewed as a tool for states to exercise selective pronatalism through bureaucratic ‘waiting time’. By following the temporal processes of migrantisation of mixed citizenship status families, this paper brings forth the question of reproductive (in-)justice and extends it to the question: Who may give birth to a ‘Danish’ citizen?