This book is an edited collection focusing on 10 of the most populous or interesting case studies for examining the century-long process through which states around the world have developed ideologies and policies regarding population growth inside their borders: the United States, West Germany, USSR, China, Nigeria, Brazil, India, Japan, Iran, and Egypt. This global perspective is skewed toward the global South, or the so-called underdeveloped world, with six of the case studies coming from this category of states, and two each from the capitalist/First World and communist/developing world categories. Although the individual cases and overall intention is not to simply rehash debates about the Cold War, what “globalization” comes to mean in this volume is, to a significant extent, connected to the aspirations of the United States since 1945 to control population growth around the world through the United Nations and a number of other nongovernmental transnational organizations, such as Planned Parenthood.
The authors present ample evidence about the direct and indirect force applied by the United States primarily through scholarly expertise and financial means. Yet the results in the countries subjected to these forms of undue influence are also unambiguously clear: These policies have had limited impact on the ground, and in most cases have failed to reach their primary objectives. An important corollary is that, in most of these countries, women have played a crucial role in responding to (and in most cases rejecting) the control imposed on them by their states, when the policies coming from above did not fit their own understanding of their personal self-interest and social role. These are, in a nutshell, the most important findings in the collection across all case studies.
The authors, however, offer a number of other new and useful conclusions in examining the relationship of specific ideologies and their implementation on the ground, the relationship between external and internal forces, and the role played by individual citizens in responding to such policies. Reproductive States begins with an analysis of Germany in the twentieth century, though only of West Germany for the post-1945 period. Annette F. Timm presents the narrative about the development of population policies in modern Germany through a trope of continuities. Simply put, the comprehensive (according to the author, more so than in any other modern state at that time) policies developed after 1918 tying public health concerns to “national rejuvenation” created a culture of entitlement among those deemed “fit,” who came to expect state support and guidance. Although Timm notes that “[c]oercion often went hand in hand with state-legitimatizing incentives” (p. 42), the focus of the discussion is almost exclusively on the incentives and rewards for compliance. Only in discussing “demographic demise” ideas does the author bring up the Nazis’ “ability to create panic in a population” (p. 46). Yet the examples she uses to show how the incentives worked to create a sense of entitlement point toward a gender split: Only condoms remained accessible, but no other forms of birth control. Men were encouraged to sow their seeds freely, while women were assumed to be satisfied recipients of their normative role as future mothers of the Aryan race. Yet Weimar Germany was not a place where all women happily agreed with this perspective, and the Nazi regime was not kind to feminism. In short, I doubt that these policies helped bring about a universal sense of individual positive choice and entitlement among fit women, rather than a sense of relief as a less vulnerable population.
In relation to West Germany’s take on fears of overpopulation, the author draws a rather unflattering picture of the country’s alignment with views and recommendations by U.S. scholars. The argument is somewhat speculative, as it rests on limited evidence linking ideas from abroad to actions inside West Germany. In a country whose scholarly community was decimated in 1945, the huge impact of a number of rising academic programs in the United States is unsurprising. And at the end of the day, Timm offers no insights into why, with all that is said in this chapter, Germany is in fact a more diverse country today in terms of its population’s ethnicity and religion than most of its European Union neighbors.
Rickie Solinger’s chapter offers a compact discussion of the population policy principles that have guided the United States since its founding, focusing especially on questions of race. This powerful analysis provides an essential frame of reference for students, policymakers, or activists seeking to understand the complexities of economic and cultural inequalities between whites and populations of color in this country. The “state” as defined in this chapter includes, however, not only laws and policies implemented directly through government agencies but also a number of other nongovernmental organizations, from Planned Parenthood to the Catholic Church. The slippage between these two realms rests, as far as I can tell, on the notion that financial support coming from the state renders an organization an arm of the state. If that is the case, then all universities receiving support from the government (and virtually all do in the United States), should be in this category as well.
What is one to make of all the debates and critiques of the discourse regarding the population bomb or regarding racial segregation that were taking place among feminist and other academics at the same time as people like Lyndon B. Johnson chose to listen only to some of these scholars? Along those lines, I found the author’s brief discussion (pp. 86–87) of the impact of feminism on ideas about and policies regarding population control puzzling: The role of feminists is acknowledged in one place, then seems diminished in the overall narrative.
The chapters focusing on Japan, Egypt, Brazil, Nigeria, and Iran all highlight the attempts to articulate comprehensive population policies especially after World War II, with the impact of the United States figuring as most prominent through experts, funding mechanisms (either through the State Department or indirectly through the UN and Planned Parenthood), and other kinds of pressure. And most of these cases also show how the policies have failed repeatedly and across these very different societies, primarily due to women’s selective responses to them. In Japan, a very active feminist movement has provided scholarly and activist perspectives on a variety of proposals (some successful, some failed) to legislate access to birth control and to incentivize specific forms of family planning. In Egypt, women have helped to uphold the type of “state feminism” that developed after 1952, as well as to critique its take on women’s identities in the family and in Islam. In predominantly Catholic Brazil, women led the way in protesting the anti-abortion policies favored by the government. Feminist activists insisted on connecting government pronouncements about population control to their critique of policies that have failed to address women’s access to education and economic opportunity.
In Nigeria, concepts of population policy that seem imported wholesale from international agencies and experts have failed miserably because of their lack of resonance with the diverse needs of the population. Given the multiplicity of religious and tribal practices, together with uneven access to education and economic opportunities, Nigerian policymakers have had a hard time finding ways to incentivize population control, especially among those living in communities where large families translate into a labor force and a lower risk of being abandoned and impoverished in old age. When these are also communities in which the state is not providing significant support for education and vocational training toward greater economic empowerment for both boys and girls, the population policy has fallen on deaf ears.
Sanjam Ahluwalia and Daksha Parmar present the case of India through an illuminating analysis of contraceptive technologies and sexual politics from 1947 to 1977. I found this to be the most detailed and interesting of the histories included in this collection. The chapter reads like a textbook case of what happens at the intersection of postcolonial nationalism, the networks of international development experts, and a very large and diverse population. India’s experience was largely one of trial by many errors. International experts had a hard time identifying policies that would work in this diverse environment without much more general education, something they did not identify as a first priority in terms of population control. Experts initially tried to encourage the rhythm method without any success. The subsequent preference for inserting intrauterine devices with some small financial incentive but no proper education for the users gave rise to the practice of insertion, removal, and reinsertion, often done in sloppy and damaging ways. Unlike most other states around the world (China is an exception), India also focused on sterilizing men, and vasectomies became very frequent in the 1970s. These practices became increasingly coercive (e.g., loss of job) under Sanjay Gandhi and were eventually abandoned.
The two communist states discussed in this collection, the USSR and China, represent different approaches to the question of population control, despite their ideological similarities. The Soviets initially decriminalized abortion, but did not facilitate access to other forms of birth control. Under Stalin, these policies changed toward a more coercive pro-natalist view of individual rights in relation to societal needs, especially given the huge casualties during World War II. Yet starting in the mid-1950s, women were able to get easier access to abortions, and continued to do so until the fall of the Soviet Union, despite alarmist studies starting in the 1970s on the demographic demise of the Soviet Union.
In China, during Mao Zedong’s rule, neo-Malthusian discourses about overpopulation were deemed bourgeois, and access to abortion was made easy for all women. It was during the period of transition under Deng Xiaoping that fears of overpopulation became real inside the upper echelons of the Communist Party, and the one-child policy was passed. Tyrene White insists on highlighting not only the internal dynamics of the way this policy came about, but also all the international factors that contributed to it. I was left rather unpersuaded by this latter discussion because the Chinese communist government has always chosen very selectively how to react to international discussions or pressure. The evidence provided here only suggests that some communist higher-ups took interest in these international discussions and used them as they saw fit in the context of already rising concerns inside the party. The most important external force in terms of driving policy implementation/change was the people of China themselves, choosing to disregard and at times confront the authorities about the disastrous impact of the one-child policy.
Though quite different in how they frame the questions, what they consider to be state actors, and whose voices can be heard in discussions about population policies, the authors of these 10 case studies present us with insightful, provocative, and useful analyses of the ways in which political actors and their attendant institutions have sought to understand and ‘solve’ the question of population growth in the twentieth century. Although broad in their powers to constrain and coerce individual citizens, states have remained somewhat ineffective in being able to drive reproductive decisions. The authors do not focus on dissent in framing their analysis, but they present important evidence concerning how biopolitics gives rise to forms of dissent (abortions, giving birth, reversing sterilization, etc.) that need to be better considered when we try to understand the reach and effectiveness of these forms of state coercion.
