Rethinking the Laws of Social Reproduction

The term social reproduction encompasses all work that creates and sustains life, from biological functions like childbearing to unpaid household chores and community care. The project expands this concept to also include women’s labour beyond domestic and care work alongside ‘abject’ forms of labour performed outside marriage and for the market: sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy and egg donation, and paid domestic work. We study how essential yet overlooked all these forms of work are, and how current legal systems fragment their treatment.

One important finding from the project is how differently the law treats each type of women’s labour. For example, sex work is governed by criminal law, erotic dance by licensing regulations, surrogacy/egg donation and domestic work by contract law, and unpaid care by family or inheritance laws. Such peripheral regulation means women’s labour is compartmentalised and often marginalised depending on where it occurs. This siloed approach, as argued in our research, entrenches the invisibility and inequality of women’s work in all sectors. To understand these dynamics, the project uses a blend of feminist legal theory and field-based research. This interdisciplinary method allows a comprehensive picture to emerge.

Fieldwork snapshots

A key strength of the project is its rich fieldwork spanning diverse regions and occupations. We have mapped stories and data revealing common threads in women’s experiences. In Tamil Nadu, for example, we documented the lives of adal padal folk dancers; women who perform at local temple festivals and celebrations. In a recent report ‘Dancing for Respectability, A Study of Karagattam and Adal Padal Dancers in Rural Tamil Nadu,’ the team examined how these dancers navigate social stigma and licensing laws. 

The project also studied domestic workers and their unions fighting for recognition. Millions of Indian women work as paid domestic help, cooking, cleaning, and caretaking in private homes, yet they lack formal labour protections. The project’s research on paid domestic work delves into campaigns to recognise domestic work as ‘decent work’ and secure rights for the workers. Through stories of domestic workers organising for fair wages and dignity, our research reveals how crucial their labour is, and how policy is slowly catching up (for example, some Indian states are considering welfare boards or minimum wages for domestic workers).

The team’s fieldwork also extends to India’s red-light districts. From Kolkata’s Sonagachi (one of Asia’s largest brothel-based sex work communities) to Pune’s Budhwar Peth (India’s third largest red-light area housing about 5000 sex workers), researchers engaged with sex workers to understand the impact of law in their lives. Sex workers shared how criminalisation increases vulnerability, even as they form unions and collectives to frame rights.

The project has also captured stories of surrogates and egg donors navigating changing laws. After decades of debates, India passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 (SRA), and the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021 (ARTA), which ban compensated forms of surrogacy and gamete donations and only allow altruistic arrangements. They also impose strict criteria on who can access or provide these services. These Acts have faced controversy and sparked legal challenges over privacy and reproductive rights concerns. Fieldwork across nine states reveals that women unanimously resist these laws and call for regulation instead of prohibition.

Our mixed-methods studies in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka show that women-targeted unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), when disbursed on time, lead to gains in financial autonomy and decision-making. The findings also underline that UCTs work best when paired with public care infrastructure, such as childcare or transport, so the UDCW burden does not simply fall back on women.

From courtrooms to classrooms to cinema halls

Beyond research papers and policy briefs, the LSR team has engaged audiences, from courts to classrooms, to drive home its findings. Our public impact work involved creating collaboration with educators, artists, activists, legal experts and workers’ unions, ensuring that the research doesn’t sit on a shelf. We partnered with acclaimed filmmaker Paromita Vohra to direct ‘Working Girls,’ a documentary portraying the journeys through the hidden world of women’s reproductive labour across India.

Working with The Heritage Lab, an Indian digital museum initiative, the project developed a digital museum titled ‘A Time of Care: Women’s Worth/Work” that showcases artistic collages, narratives and multimedia highlighting women’s labour, past and present. In a collaboration with Flow India, an educational consultancy, we created a first-of-its-kind learning toolkit for middle school children. The toolkit introduces students (ages 12-14) to the concept of invisible labour and gender roles. Partnering with the legal design group Justice Adda, we developed legal primers on the ARTA and SRA and an animated explainer to demystify the new laws. In February 2025, the project co-hosted the Indian Care Debates in Bengaluru with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, bringing together government officials, civil society organisations and researchers.

As part of our policy engagement, we filed an intervener application before the Supreme Court of India in the challenges to the SRA and ARTA, urging a rights-based reading that entitles surrogates and egg donors to fair compensation. In parallel, we partnered with 11 domestic workers’ unions on a public interest litigation seeking a Supreme Court declaration that domestic workers are entitled to minimum wages as a constitutional right under Article 23.

Bridging silos

A central aim of the project is to break down the silos separating debates on women’s work, which are usually discussed in isolation, each in its own policy lane. We propose a holistic, rights-based regulatory framework that treats all forms of women’s reproductive labour as fundamentally important and interrelated. This could mean, for example, extending labour protections and social security to all individuals performing care work, whether paid or unpaid, or developing license regimes that protect dancers and sex workers from exploitation without stigmatising them. This project is a concerted effort to rewrite narratives around women’s work. By connecting the dots between a homemaker in her kitchen in rural Karnataka, a domestic worker in rural Maharashtra, a sex worker in a Pune brothel, an egg donor in a Mumbai clinic, and a dancer on a Madurai stage, the project insists that all these women deserve visibility, protection, and dignity. It proposes a future society where a woman’s labour is not judged by where it happens or whether money changes hands, but by its intrinsic value to society and the rights of the worker performing it. 

Find out more about the project.