Reproductive Urges challenges traditional and Marxist accounts of the oppositional relationship between "production" and "reproduction" by focusing on "reproduction" as one of the most widely used and highly contested concepts in modern culture. Although it appears to refer only to the most obvious of biological facts, Anita Levy contends that "reproduction" includes a diverse field of cultural and social practices.

Levy looks to the writings of Charlotte Lennox, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, among others, to explain both conceptual changes in notions of "reproduction," and the acute anxiety about controlling it still dominant in contemporary debates concerning the individual, the family, and sexuality.