Introduction
While I wrote my book on innovation, I encountered the language of innovation everywhere. My university erected a new building: The Frost Center for Research and Innovation. I applied for academic grants that were evaluated for their innovativeness. My daughter’s elementary school built an Innovation Lab and sent home “iInnovate” challenge boxes. I visited Seattle’s Bezos Center for Innovation in the city’s Museum of History and Industry.
The term innovation is so ubiquitous that we risk ignoring it or discounting its importance. It’s tempting to view it as nothing more than a new buzzword, signifying nothing. Instead, my book, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, maintains that the sudden rise of innovation-speak over the last few decades in the United States is in fact an important political and economic phenomenon that requires serious scholarly attention.
Choice cannot be understood as equivalent to freedom because political, economic, and social structures shape the choices we have and influence how we make decisions.
My book analyzes many instantiations of innovation, such as how it is used in the Bezos Center for Innovation and in my daughter’s iInnovate boxes. In doing so, the book explores the logic of innovation and its implications for social justice. One of the book’s key arguments is that in the United States the overvaluation of innovation is connected to the rise of policies and beliefs that have further devalued care work.
Innovation Policy versus Reproductive Policy
For much of its history, which goes back to Ancient Greece, innovation had a negative connotation of threatening the status quo. However, by the 1970s, innovation had acquired its contemporary connotations of problem-solving, novelty, and profitability. Beginning around this time, the United States instituted policies intended to spur innovation.
Such innovation policy included everything from deregulation to encouraging publicly-funded research to be used as the basis for patents and private wealth accumulation. The idea that innovations solve all manner of problems and are the basis of prosperity and American economic dominance was used to justify such policies. On this logic, state policies should encourage private corporate actors to innovate because innovations benefit the common good.
At the same time that innovation policy was on the rise, the United States eroded public support for care work, or what I call reproductive labor. This is the work, predominantly done by women, of caring for each other and our communities through activities like raising children and taking care of the ill, disabled, and elderly. While this work has long been undervalued and poorly paid, it underwent a number of changes in the late twentieth century.
Not only did the state slash social welfare, driven by anti-Black racism and the demonization of Black women, more women entered the professional workplace. These women, who were mostly white, tended to employ women of color to do precarious and poorly remunerated care work.
As the caring service industry expanded, care work continued to be stratified along racial lines. Only certain people could access care in the market. The work of bearing and raising children was viewed more as a personal responsibility than a collective good that should be publicly supported. This has led to the care gap: the unmet need for caring work.
Overvaluing Innovation, Devaluing Reproduction
This overview highlights the distinct ways in which policies and public actors have framed innovation in contrast to reproduction. According to the dominant view, public resources and regulations should be used to encourage corporate actors to create innovations because innovations are good for everyone. This framing obscures that alleged tech fixes often propel the wealth accumulation and outsized political and economic influence of a small minority, exacerbating inequalities of wealth and political power.
Reproductive justice and disability justice thus point to the possibility of a world otherwise, a world in which care is prioritized over innovation.
In contrast, policies have treated reproductive labor as an individual good and an individual responsibility. On this view, public support for reproductive labor is unjustified, and even unjust. Yet this framing hides the fact that reproductive labor forms the basis for our communities, economies, and societies. Care work is thus the basis of any true innovation.
In Reproductive Labor and Innovation I trace how the overvaluation of technological innovation is connected to the devaluation of reproductive labor in the United States. I argue that there are material and symbolic links between the two phenomena. For example, tax cuts for corporations that supposedly enable innovations helped to justify slashing support for social welfare and the work of raising children.
Moreover, when state and corporate actors present technological innovations as the salve for all manner of social problems, they implicitly and sometimes explicitly diminish the importance of care work for society’s well-being. Thus, the tendency to invest in technoscientific innovations and hype them as solutions contributes in many instances to the devaluation of reproductive labor.
Digital Reproductive Innovations
Corporate and state actors often tout technological innovation as the solution to all manner of problems, including those besetting reproduction itself. Yet, as with other innovations, reproductive technoscientific “fixes” tend to obscure and worsen structural problems. Such reproductive fixes claim to provide individuals with more control while in fact weakening and undermining collective, justice-oriented solutions to reproductive problems.
One technological “fix” that I detail in the book is the rise of digital platforms for finding and hiring care workers. Platforms such as Care.com, on which parents and others can find domestic laborers such as nannies, purport to solve the care gap. Care.com has promoted its offerings in the following way: “We’re using technology and innovation to solve one of the greatest human challenges.” This “solution” papers over the structural sources of problems and may worsen them.
There are many new and emerging reproductive biotechnologies that are changing the landscape of reproduction.
For example, research suggests that workers who find work on Care.com do not have higher wages or less precarious working conditions. Rather, such platforms encourage those who are seeking work on them to engage in new kinds of unpaid labor. Prospective care workers labor on branding themselves as trustworthy, responsive, and caring—with women of color often having to do more work to present themselves as good caregivers yet continuing to be paid less than white caregivers.
The companies themselves do not take on any of the responsibilities if something goes wrong in the employment relationship. Nonetheless, the platforms make money off of the work of the caregivers and charge those seeking care fees to use their services. These platforms push an ethos of entrepreneurship that encourages care workers to see their work as empowering entrepreneurship rather than as labor that is creating wealth for others.
Biotechnologies
Other technological “solutions” for reproduction are aimed at biological processes. There are many new and emerging reproductive biotechnologies that are changing the landscape of reproduction. Vast amounts of private investment undergird these technological changes. Venture capitalists and other investors make key decisions about which technologies to pursue, putting their money toward innovations they hope will be lucrative investments. Finance capitalists are thus reshaping the biotechnology of reproduction, with wide-ranging consequences for humanity.
To take one example, several biotechnology startups are working on developing a process called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). IVG is the process of making sperm and eggs from skin cells. If successfully developed, the technology would allow people to create a practically unlimited supply of embryos. Such embryos could be screened using existing genetic screening technologies so that prospective parents could choose “optimal” offspring.
IVG could be used for the laudable goal of enabling people who could not otherwise reproduce—such as people with infertility or queer couples—to reproduce. However, some supporters of this, and other emerging genetic reproductive technologies, tout them for their ability to “enhance” humanity and create “superior” humans. This reasoning smacks of eugenic beliefs in genetic determinism and the ranking of humans based on their genes.
One supporter of genetic engineering of humans, former Oxford philosopher and New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bostrom, goes so far as to argue that humans genetically engineered for intelligence would be more innovative. Such people would be better positioned to solve any number of global problems, from climate change to inequality to science and technology policy.
Individual Responsibility versus Collective Solutions
Bostrom’s view represents the ideology of innovation taken to an extreme. Rather than seeing global issues as political and as requiring structural change to address, Bostrom fetishizes superintelligent humans as the solution to our problems. It is not far-fetched to think that some prospective parents would choose genetic “enhancement” if it were offered to them. They may then come to see their children as superior and judge parents who refuse genetic engineering.
This, and other alleged technological fixes, threaten to devalue reproductive labor more and reinforce the idea that it is primarily an individual responsibility. In a context in which public support for childrearing is already diminished and demonized, parents may latch on to the individual control that reproductive technologies purport to enable. If you could have an “enhanced” offspring, who might be better able to thrive in a precarious economy, why wouldn’t you do it?
This approach to technology reinforces the view that childbearing and childrearing are primarily individual concerns. Such an approach is at odds with a view of collective, social responsibility for the care and support of all children. What, then, can be done to combat or reverse the over-valuation of technological innovations?
Conclusion
Throughout the book, I draw on the frameworks of disability justice and reproductive justice. Both frameworks were developed primarily by people of color to oppose the problems with individualized approaches to rights that ignored power relations and intersectional injustice. For example, the term reproductive justice was coined by Black women activists in response to the emphasis on choice in mainstream reproductive rights organizations. Reproductive justice and disability justice highlight that choice cannot be understood as equivalent to freedom because political, economic, and social structures shape the choices we have and influence how we make decisions.
Applying these frameworks to reproductive technology shows us the importance of looking at things like the policies that underpin the development of technologies. Rather than focusing solely on the choices that confront caretakers and prospective parents, these frameworks ask us to interrogate how people come to be presented with a certain set of options in the first place. They call for structural economic change.
Reproductive justice and disability justice thus point to the possibility of a world otherwise, a world in which care is prioritized over innovation. One key concept of disability justice is the notion of interdependency. This notion counters the common fiction of independence that justifies treating reproductive labor as an individual concern. Interdependency also focuses on our connections to one another and our fundamental dependence on others, underscoring the necessity of material support for care work.
