Presenter: Samuel K. Finn

Faculty Sponsor: Angela Bateman

School: Cape Cod Community College

Research Area: Sociology and Anthropology

Session: Poster Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM, Auditorium, A76

ABSTRACT

Public discourse in the United States increasingly centers on declining birth rates and their implications for population aging, economic stability, and the long-term sustainability of the labor force. At the same time, many economic and healthcare structures continue to make childbearing financially and medically precarious for large segments of the population. Drawing on sociological frameworks of stratified reproduction, structural inequality, and reproductive governance, this study examines the contradiction between growing concern over fertility decline and the uneven institutional support that exists for reproduction. Using a qualitative literature review, the paper analyzes scholarship on fertility discourse, family policy, maternal health disparities, and access to reproductive healthcare in order to assess how reproduction is differentially supported across social groups. The paper argues that while reproduction is frequently framed as a national priority, the policies and institutional structures that sustain it are distributed unevenly, privileging some populations while leaving others to confront significant economic and health-related barriers to family formation.