Volume 88 June 2010 Issue 5

Globalization, Women’s Work, and Care Needs: The Urgency of Reconciliation Policies

1501

Lourdes Beneria

This Address argues that the increase in women’s participation in paid work in many countries has made more manifest the tensions around balancing family and labor market work, hence making more obvious the need to solve the problems of care facing many families. First, the Address focuses on the significance of demographic changes affecting... »

Families on the Edge: Governing Home and Work in a Globalized Economy

1527

Kerry Rittich

Scholars working in the fields of labor law, globalization, law and development, and of course gender now encounter the family at every turn. This is sometimes true even when families and households are officially absent from the debate or issue under discussion, as is often the case. Whether the topic is the transformation of... »

Globalization, Canadian Family Policy, and the Omissions of Neoliberalism

1559

Janine Brodie

The relationship between globalization, family structures, and social policy is complex, uneven, and evolving. This Article examines social policy reform in Canada during the past two decades in order to advance three propositions about the relationship between globalization and public policy: first, the influence of globalization on social policy is neither direct nor uniform... »

Families, Human Dignity, and State Support for Caretaking: Why the United States’ Failure to Ameliorate the Work-family Conflict is a Dereliction of the Government’s Basic Responsibilities

1593

Maxine Eichner

In the last two generations, the hours worked by American families have increased significantly as greater numbers of women have moved into the workplace. The resulting work patterns have put considerable stress on family life, particularly when it comes to accomplishing the caretaking tasks traditionally performed by women. The legal and policy responses to... »

Achieving Accountability for Migrant Domestic Worker Abuse

1627

Janie A. Chuang

Domestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers’ remittances constitute a rich source of revenues for their countries of origin, while their labor ameliorates the “care deficit” experienced in wealthier countries of destination. Despite the importance of their work, migrant domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers... »

Abortion Access in the Global Marketplace

1657

Martha F. Davis

In the United States, government funding of legal abortion for low-income women has been uniquely “de-linked” from the fundamental right to an abortion. While the underlying right to an abortion has been repeatedly reaffirmed, federal courts have been unreceptive to any imposition of an affirmative governmental obligation to fund the exercise of the right.... »

Race and Market Values in Domestic Infant Adoption

1687

Barbara Fedders

For prospective parents seeking to adopt U.S.-born babies, white infants are the most in demand and, relatively speaking, in the shortest supply. Some domestic adoption agencies have responded to this mismatch by assessing higher fees for the adoption of white infants than for infants of other races. After briefly considering the historically prominent role... »

Credit for Motherhood

1715

Melissa B. Jacoby

This Essay builds on prior work exploring the impact of consumer lenders who sell credit products for assisted reproduction and adoption. After reviewing some basic attributes of the parenthood lending market, the Essay discusses how not-for-profit lenders promote traditional conceptions of motherhood and the division of carework in ways that credit discrimination laws were... »

A Woman’s Worth

1739

Kimberly D. Krawiec

This Article examines three traditionally “taboo trades”: (1) the sale of sex, (2) compensated egg donation, and (3) commercial surrogacy. The Article purposely invokes examples in which the compensated provision of goods or services (primarily or exclusively by women) is legal, but in which commodification is only partially achieved or is constrained in some... »

The Very Uneasy Case Against Remittances: An Ex Ante Perspective

1771

Adam Feibelman

Money that individual migrants send back to their home countries has become a major source of foreign exchange for many developing and emerging economies. These remittances now represent a sizable percentage of the gross domestic product for many states; for some, remittance inflows are larger than all other sources of foreign capital. In recent... »

The Effects of U.S. Deportation Policies on Immigrant Families and Communities: Cross-Border Perspectives

1799

Jacqueline Hagan, Brianna Castro, and Nestor Rodriguez

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has enacted a series of laws that makes it easier to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens. These laws, which have been highly criticized for the devastation they have brought to immigrant families, represent an abrupt departure from post–World War II immigration policies, which provided increasing rights to immigrants... »

Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family

1825

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas

Migration destabilizes families or what we think families should “look” like, as it forces the transformation of households from nuclear to transnational structures, challenges the traditional gender division of labor, and imposes the barrier of geographical distance on marital and intergenerational relations. Looking at the case of migration from the Philippines, this Article examines... »

Disruptions, Dislocations, and Inequalities: Transnational Latino/a Families Surviving the Global Economy

1857

Leah Schmalzbauer

This Article draws on field research with Honduran and Mexican transnational families and the transnational family literature to explore how global inequality is influencing gender and class relations within poor migrant families. This Article begins with an overview of the relationship between globalization, Latino/a migration, and transnational family formation. The Article then details and... »

The Legal Production of the Transgressive Family: Binational Family Relationships Between Cuba and the United States

1881

Deborah M. Weissman

This Article reviews the relationship between U.S. policy after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the legal mechanisms that have influenced the character of the binational Cuban-American family since then. Over the course of the last fifty years, the United States has used the rule of law to deny families fundamental customs of care-taking and... »