Subjected to inadequate living conditions, forced mobilities and protracted confinement, mothers in the British asylum system conceive, gestate, give birth to, and raise children while experiencing gendered and racialized forms of state violence and control. Writing about motherhood in the asylum system, I argue in this paper, requires finding particular ways of thinking about the forms of life that survive, resist, and often also thrive in vulnerabilizing and harmful spaces, and about the care practices that enable them to do so. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research on the reproductive experiences of women residing in asylum accommodation in London, this paper examines how mothers answer the impacts of asylum politics that marginalise, impoverish, and sicken them and their families with mundane, sketchy, and often improvised acts of making life possible and worth living. Within a reproductive justice framework, this paper draws attention to how the punitive and restrictive policies that govern life in asylum accommodation result in reproductive insecurity and fear, redefining the ability of mothers to provide care in ways they consider best, and suggests that care is a powerful site for articulating how the right to mother in dignifying circumstances is not granted to everyone. What is it like for mothers to care when caring takes place in sites defined by practices opposite to the sustainment of life? How do mothers nurture the life of others in sites that facilitate their very own suffering? In a context in which their ability to care is significantly complicated by the everyday work of bearing the fears of destitution and deportation, but also of illness, sexual violence, and the lingering of the afterlives of trauma in their children, mothers use the ordinary and the mundane to make the world a more affirming place for their children.
