Theories of Reproductive Behavior: A Marxist Critique

Current theories of reproductive behavior fall within voluntaristic or deterministic frameworks. Micro-economic theories that view children as con sumer goods or home produced goods which parents either purchase or produce subject to income, price, and taste constraints, are essentially voluntaristic. Sociological theories, on the other hand, stress the socially determined and coer cive nature of reproductive behavior. From the standpoint of historical material ism, both theories are open to criticism because they provide a reified and ahis torical account of reproductive behavior based upon unacknowledged capitalist forms of consciousness and forms of social objectivity. It is argued that a scien tific analysis of reproduction should transcend the voluntaristic and determin istic alternatives which are the hallmark of bourgeois thought. Instead, using the method of historical materialism, reproduction should be conceptualized in structural, concrete, and historical terms; i.e., as the reflection of the reproduc tive strategies of classes in the context of a given mode of production.