The following is an excerpt from “Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times” by Tamara Lea Spira.

Queering Families locates the question of queering reproductive justice — of demanding the conditions for collective life against all odds — as a commitment to radical interdependency. The book thus belongs within a genealogy of radical Black feminist, Indigenous, and queer-of-color work. As a queer mother and abolitionist, I write, in particular, from a specific historical conjuncture of ever-widening precarities in which competing claims upon the future across the political spectrum hinge upon the question of children and their futures.

Competing claims over children’s futures often find expression in moral panics. Gayle Rubin has famously argued that debates over sexuality, reproduction, and children function as a screen for larger geopolitical contestations in times of national instability, carrying an “immense symbolic weight” that stands in for other national fears. The trope of the innocent child in peril has, historically, been effective in galvanizing nationalist fervor because, as Erica Meiners elaborates, “invoking real or imagined children produces an irreproachable purity.” For to oppose the protection of the child “is almost unthinkable— tactically impossible, an intimate violation.”

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A heightened moral panic also forms the historical backdrop for Queering Families, which I write in a moment when, to draw from Rebekah Sheldon, the figure of the child carries an emotional charge that is heightened by widespread societal insecurities. As Sheldon argues, contemporary “conditions of planetary threat” lead to an atmosphere in which “the child, the fetus, and the reproductive woman [sic] become subjects of intense discursive investment.” These dynamics feature prominently in contemporary political debates, amid intersecting crises of ecological, political, and economic precarity. As planetary threats amplify, actors on all sides of the political spectrum invoke the figure of the imperiled child to justify a wide range of political agendas and issues — from guns in schools, to health care access for transgender youth, to pandemic-era masking in schools, to children’s book bans, and more.

Within this context, the Right mobilizes the bogeyman of a secular “wokeness” that threatens to encroach upon conservative worldviews. Parents crowd school boards and influence state legislatures to police everything from the teaching of history to the provision of gender-affirming care. Here the image of the imperiled child mobilizes publics, as political leaders call upon Christian “mamas” to “lay down [their lives] . . . for [their] children . . . to advocate for their children’s innocence,” to quote Daily Citizen author Nicole Hunt. Meanwhile, the GOP’s 2023 “Parents Bill of Rights” demands the teaching of content that is “rooted in the history and culture of Western civilization” and invokes a so-called parental “right to know” if a school employee or contractor acts to “change a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name” or grants transgender or gender- nonconforming children the right to appropriate bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports programming, thus effectively waging war upon LGBTQ+ children, employees, and families. The trope of childhood innocence is constructed in opposition to the specter of a racial, sexual, and national Other, who threatens the purity and sanctity of a white life. This stems from a history of “childhood innocence” as a concept that, as Robin Bernstein has demonstrated, emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century and gained purchase in direct opposition to dominant con-structs of Black culpability.

This rhetoric exemplifies the ways that the trope of childhood innocence acts to preserve the ideals of whiteness, heterosexuality, and reproductive normativity. It also further encodes which children are imagined to be worthy of protection — and which are not — as well as who is even imagined to be a child in the first place. For the Right, the figure of the imperiled child is a dog whistle, despite the material, environmental, economic, and health harms caused to actual children by the policies being promoted. This leads historian Michael Bronski to conclude that what “is… foremost a plea for an imagined innocence of the past… has nothing to do with actual children.”⁷⁰

However, it is not just the Right that mobilizes the figure of the imperiled child in the face of perceived existential threats. Discourses of children’s rights and well-being have also been highly effective at organizing liberals and progressives in contradictory ways. This has been especially the case in the era of COVID-19. Take, for example, Urgency of Normal, a campaign that coalesced in Blue states, bringing together “for the child” rhetoric with a quest to resuscitate racial capitalism at all costs. Initially started up in 2020 as an informal coalition of physicians based in San Francisco and New York, Urgency of Normal opposed school closures, expanding to argue for the unmitigated opening of schools as vaccines became available to adults. They argued that pandemic mitigations in schools and classrooms amounted to a “kids-last” policy — even in a time when vaccines were not yet available to most youth. Challenging mask requirements and opposing teachers’ unions, the group issued its own form of for-the-child rhetoric that strung together cherry-picked data to promulgate the false narrative that COVID-19 did not medically affect kids. This was especially dangerous to disabled and immunocompromised children, as well as children in intergenerational households or living with vulnerable family members. Moreover, this narrative capitalized upon the real suffering of parents, papering over important questions like sick pay, a spike in homelessness and hunger among children, and necessary financial supports for struggling parents.

Urgency of Normal reframed the discussion in ways that explicitly excluded critical discussions of supports like universal healthcare or safe affordable childcare, also foreclosing key questions about why children could not access a hot meal or vital services outside of schools, and refusing to join with a simultaneous national struggle to shift state expenditures from prisons and war into community supports. It thus abetted the concerted attack that has taken place upon the already-inadequate social safety net. It was here that the neoliberal and neoconservative agendas converged. What had once been a stance associated with neoconservative groups (such as Moms for Liberty, funded by the Koch brothers) was repurposed for Blue states. This move shifted the discourse by mainstreaming the antimask, antimitigation message under the pretext of doing it “for the children.”

In both its neoconservative and neoliberal instantiations, child-as-proxy logic silences key questions about the real harms and dangers facing children under racial capitalism, as neither the Right nor the Left commits to actions that come anywhere close to addressing the ecological, economic, and political catastrophes that our children are inheriting. Instead, they advance moralizing calls to save children that actively deflect us away from the deeper conditions that actually pose threats to children. These contradictions grow all the more unbearable amidst an active genocide. Queering Families shifts the discussion to ask how both positions eclipse the real work that we must do to combat the systems, such as settler colonialism, prisons, and racial capitalism, that plunge current and future generations even deeper into ecological and economic catastrophe. The book thus seeks to push past the child-as-proxy to raise questions about what kinds of solidarities a queer politics of reproductive justice requires.

This context frames Queering Families, which locates debates surrounding reproduction in a political landscape where crises of ecological and economic precarity come to a head. A politics of queering reproductive justice, I argue, must resist the affective draw into child savior discourses grounded in moral panics. Rather, we must abolish the harmful systems that imperil current youth and future generations of all living creatures.

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