Fatal misconception: the struggle to control world population (original) (raw)
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In 2011, the global population reached 7 billion. Environmentalists, demographers and experts in development and public health renewed calls to regulate population growth in order to reduce poverty and conserve the world's resources for future generations. At the same time, China's one child policy, arguably one of the world's most well--known population control policies, has faced mounting criticism in light of recent evidence of highly coercive practices. The study of population is not limited to the jurisdiction of demography, a discipline concerned with the calculation and prediction of population growth and decline. Rather, the measurement of population is a deeply political process that determines the allocation of resources within society. Policymakers and their expert advisors in health, environment and the economy draw on demographic data to develop policies designed to regulate population such as access to contraception and abortion, work/family benefits, the regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and adoption, and fertility incentives or disincentives. This class uses a feminist approach to trace the emergence of population science as a form of social regulation. We will examine how ideologies of race and gender have shaped historical and contemporary population discourse and policy around the world. We will identify and critique various phases in global population discourse and goals articulated by the United Nations, from the end of the colonial era to the Millennium Development Goals of 2000. Throughout the course, we will pay attention to the intersection between global and national population discourse and the everyday meanings and practices related to fertility and reproduction in women's lives. We will also investigate how population policies and technologies create new reproductive opportunities and constraints that are inextricably linked to broader gender and economic inequities between the global North and South. This course embraces a multi--disciplinary approach to studying population, drawing on literature from sociology, anthropology, political science, history, human rights, demography and epidemiology. Course objectives:
Abstract This paper utilized an oral history resource to document the transformation of population policies into women’s focused practices and the perception that guided the major actors of this local revolution. The Population Control movement has been a powerful political and health movement that developed family planning to reduce population growth during the Cold War era. It relied upon philanthropic commitment before successfully becoming an official US policy from Nixon to Reagan. The anti-abortion controversies and political conservatism then diminished considerably the general acceptance of population policies globally. The revolution in population policies demanded a patient effort to conquer strategic positions and to develop new policies. Women program officers played the central role, along with prominent political figures. Most of the transformation occurred at the Cairo conference in 1994, where moderate population experts and feminists came to a compromise. This study finally focuses on the repercussions of the new reproductive health agenda in population
Population policy and contraceptive choice
Asian Journal of Law and Society, 2021
The book is a gust of fresh wind within the crowd of demographic literature. The authors successfully took a rather niche topic of contraceptive use and expanded the scope to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach by fusing the politics of family planning to the choice of contraceptives, at the level of a continent. The book comes at a crucial moment when, perhaps for the first time since 1965 Belgrade conference, the world is contemplating the necessity for population control.1 It is this style of historical narrative to gaze into the legacy of Asian family-planning programmes that makes this book such a captivating read. Contrary to the popular discourse, population numbers have not stopped being a challenge to the policy-makers. Even as the two giants, India and China, approach replacement level and much of the former USSR is experiencing a sustained negative growth, the world population continues to grow at an alarming rate.2 With improving standards of living and per-capita ...
The Changing Discourse on Population and Development: Toward a New Political Demography
Studies in Family Planning, 2005
The adoption of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994 was the culmination of years of debate and, in the end, compromise in the international discourse on population and development. The current status of the population and reproductive health movement owes much to the process and decisions taken during the time period 1990-94 and to their subsequent implementation. Indeed, the transformation of international population discourse from the merely technical to the clearly political has had far-reaching ramifications Commentary and is far from over. The Millennium Project has sought to reestablish an evidence-based approach, but in a markedly new policy environment. A (Too) Brief History of the Population Conferences The first international population conferences, in Rome in 1954 and Belgrade in 1965, were meetings of demographers and technical experts without intergovernmental representation or resolutions. Economic and demographic research in the 1950s (for example, Davis 1951; Coale and Hoover 1958) demonstrated that high fertility rates and growing population posed a constraint on development in poor countries. At the same time, in the geopolitical arena rapid population growth in the developing world came to be viewed as a security threat. The REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND THE UN MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
World Population Growth, Family Planning, and American Foreign Policy
Journal of Policy History, 1995
The U.S. government position on world population growth as it emerged in the early 1960s was a fundamental departure in both content and commitment. We embraced the idea that one of the goals of American foreign policy should be the simultaneous reduction of both mortality and fertility across the Third World. It was not simply rhetoric. As the years passed, we committed a growing portion of our foreign aid to that end. The decision to link U.S. foreign-policy objectives with the subsidy of family planning and population control was truly exceptional in that it explicitly aimed at altering the demographic structure of foreign countries through long-term intervention. No nation had ever set in motion a foreign-policy initiative of such magnitude. Its ultimate goal was no less than to alter the basic fertility behavior of the entire Third World! Whether one views this goal as idealistic and naive or as arrogant and self-serving, the project was truly of herculean proportions.