This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.

From the late 1960s to late 1970s, a number of family planning clinics were established across the country. This chapter explores the experiences of activists involved in these clinics, the personal risks they took and their motivations for involvement. The importance of national and international networks is explored. The demand for the clinics across the country shows that many Irish men and women were beginning to exercise their own agency in relation to their reproductive choices. The stories of these family planning clinics, also show the importance of medical authority and how the medical model was seen to legitimise the work they were doing, but also enabled the clinics to provide a wider range of family planning options. While the groups ultimately did not succeed in broadening contraceptive access to a wide range of socioeconomic classes, they played a significant role in the liberalisation of family planning law in 1970s Ireland and opening up debates on the issue.

This chapter highlights how, in the absence of legal access to artificial methods, natural methods of family planning, in particular calendar-based methods remained popular, particularly for couples who were born in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, for many couples, having children was an accepted part of marriage; contraceptive methods only tended to be used after participants had already had children in order to ‘space’ subsequent pregnancies, or in order to ‘stop’ pregnancies following the completion of the family. In contrast to Ireland, visions of England as a ‘permissive’ society persisted well into the twentieth century. The chapter also seeks to explore the dynamics of decision-making around family planning in the period, illustrating how women began to exhibit more agency around these choices, and that contraception was generally seen as a female responsibility. It will also illuminate the impact that lack of access to artificial contraception had on individuals.

Chapter 6 traces the One Child Policy’s lifespan from its introduction in 1979 until its replacement with the Two Child Policy in 2015. I show that the extent to which the One Child Policy was actually enforced and the ways in which it was received differed significantly in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang. For some couples, particularly those in more economically developed cities like Shanghai and Tianjin, the policy simply affirmed personal convictions that smaller families are more economical and allow children to have better educational opportunities. In smaller cities like Luoyang, however, policy violations were more common as family size – as well as the existence of a male heir – remained more important than the opportunities allocated to those children. This chapter also interrogates the renewed interest in eugenics among parents wishing to “optimize” the qualities of their one and only child, as well as the limited scale and scope of sex education, a trend that exacerbated the reliance on abortion as premarital birth control.

Chapter 9 considers overpopulation, its impact on the Earth and on the other mega-threats as well as its solutions – global, national, and personal.

In Does v. Gillespie, Medicaid beneficiaries sued the director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services claiming that terminating Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid provider agreements violated their federal right under the Medicaid Act to choose any “qualified” provider that offers covered services. The Eighth Circuit held that the free choice of provider provision in the federal Medicaid Act did not create rights enforceable by individual beneficiaries. In their feminist judgment, Melissa Alexander and Jennifer Oliva argue that the clear language of the Medicaid Act unambiguously demonstrates that Congress intended to confer a private right of enforcement under the free choice of provider provision. Elizabeth Kukura’s commentary emphasizes the importance of focusing on the lived experience of Medicaid beneficiaries who rely on Planned Parenthood for basic health care needs. Kukura highlights the influence of anti-abortion politics and ideology on health care access and the structural forms of discrimination that shape it.

This chapter examines the birth control survey research conducted by population technocrats c.1947–60, and analyzes how this research resonated with government efforts to manage the emerging problem of “overpopulation” via fertility regulation. Focusing on the leading population technocrat Shinozaki Nobuo, this chapter depicts how human agency participated in the at times precarious relationship between policy and practice. It also shows how the epistemological framework inscribed in the scientific knowledge produced by the survey research, harmonized with the economic and political rationale that buttressed the post-WWII state’s reconstruction efforts. To illustrate this point, the chapter examines: (1) the evident absence of the category of race and (2) the categorization of data by region and the research participants’ socioeconomic status. For (1), it contends that, by maintaining silence on the question of race, the research consolidated an image of Japan’s population as ethnically homogeneous, which was becoming increasingly dominant political discourse during this period. The phenomenon (2), I argue, embodied the burgeoning developmentalist logic that explicitly portrayed reproductive practices in terms of a nation’s socioeconomic achievement. Together, these phenomena served to produce a certain knowledge of the Japanese population that was particularly compatible with post-WWII Japan’s reconstruction efforts.

The level of awareness of one’s own sexuality and of its expression have always depended not only on a person’s stage of life but, first and foremost, on the specific cultural and religious milieus in which the person lives and operates. Since time immemorial, a special place in female sexuality has been reserved for the period of gestation, whether planned or unwanted. Becoming pregnant represents a unique time in a woman’s life, involving changes that are not only physical but also psychological. It is a period of change in a woman’s behavior and even sexual life, although we have entered an era of major evolution of the way we see sexuality and reproduction. Today, advances in reproductive medicine are progressively transforming basic human behavior in which the main emphasis has been on “sex for reproduction” into a situation where “sex without reproduction” is widely accepted. Finally, over the last few decades, “reproduction without sex” is increasingly taking hold. Indeed, an rising number of couples worldwide have been creating families where the offspring are the fruit of one of the many assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Therefore, reproduction without sex, looked at with suspicion and even open hostility only 30 years ago, has now entered a stage where it is considered a perfectly “natural” way of creating a family and – at least in the Western world – is increasing utilized by couples made by two individuals of the same genetic sex. Obviously, this new situation, not approved in a number of countries and perfectly legal in others, has created problems and is opposed by vocal groups with various arguments. The evolving relationship between sexuality and reproduction, the emergence of the new paradigm of reproduction without sex, with its influence on the two adult partners as well as on the offspring, will be briefly discussed from the point of view of its links to traditional sexuality, as well as taking into account the new options that are surfacing today.

Egg freezing was initially introduced as a fertility preservation measure in women without a male partner who were about to undergo gonadotoxic treatments. The use of oocyte cryopreservation for social reasons has been an increasingly popular strategy for women to preserve their fertility potential, a term most referred to as ‘social egg freezing’ (SEF). As well as for career progression or waiting until they are financially more secure, some women may be single, or may decide to egg freeze to relieve pressure on a relationship, until they decide they are ready to have children with their partner. Upon introduction, success rates with SEF were low due to poor oocyte survival rates. With the advent of oocyte vitrification techniques, assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedures using frozen oocytes have shown a similar live birth rate (LBR) to those using fresh oocytes. Due to this growing evidence for the efficacy of egg freezing, both the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) changed their stances and no longer consider oocyte freezing to be an experimental technique.