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A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control
Gender, Place & Culture
Abstract
Following the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, which prompted a discursive shift from population control to reproductive health and rights in international development, policy experts and scholars have relegated population control to the realm of history. This presents a unique challenge to feminist critics who seek to identify manifestations of population control in the present. In this article, we consider the potential of ‘populationism’ as terminology that may assist in clarifying varied new manifestations of population control. We explicate three interrelated populationist strategies that focus on optimizing numbers (demo), spaces (geo), and life itself (bio). Through our elaboration of these three populationisms and their interaction, we seek to inspire feminist, intersectional responses to the pernicious social, economic and environmental problems that technocratic populationist interventions obscure.
... In this paper, I argue that despite ICPD's promotion of individual choice, the managing of Madagascar's population is still very much oriented towards regulation of fertility rather than reproductive autonomy. Like other countries in the Global South, Madagascar's high fertility rate has been framed as an impediment to the island's economic development and political stability in global policy circles (Bhatia et al. 2020). This has resulted in the implementation of strict top-down interventions aimed at population reduction by lowering birth rates. ...
... Feminist scholars have therefore argued that contemporary policies on sexual and reproductive health in former colonies, Madagascar included, need to be situated and understood within the larger history of (neo-)colonial measures to restrict African reproduction (Kuumba 1999). For example, from 1945 to 1990, the dominant discourse on reproduction in the Global South was informed by a demographic rationale advocating strict regulation of fertility (Hartmann 2016(Hartmann [1987; Bhatia et al. 2020;Merchant 2021;Foley 2022). Alongside this population control paradigm, the reproductive health paradigm represented by the ICPD has instead sought to promote bodily autonomy, individual choice, and female empowerment (Unnithan 2022). ...
... The Family Planning 2020 Initiative (FP 2020) pledged therefore to have an additional 120 million women become users of modern contraceptives in 69 of the world's poorest countries by 2020. However, while the FP 2020 actively uses the language of rights and women's empowerment, it has been criticized alongside other target-driven population policies with measurable aims for concealing invasive top-down population control interventions under the veil of human rights approaches (Bhatia et al. 2020). To increase contraceptive prevalence, FP 2020 has, for example, enabled the return of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as implants and intrauterine devices (IUDs) (Bendix et al. 2020). ...
In Madagascar, the law on abortion is highly restrictive. In practice, this means that most women are unable to access a legal abortion. Nevertheless, for women who live in urban areas and can afford it, safe abortions are still available clandestinely within the private health care sector. Drawing on nine weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in the central highland cities of Antananarivo and Antsirabe in 2016 and 2017, in this article, I discuss how clandestine abortion providers and their clients navigate between restrictive laws, conservative moral regimes, and extensible practices on abortion. By discussing a seeming access paradox between abortion law, policy, and practice, the article plays into critical feminist scholarship that highlights the gap between the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICDP) discourse on reproductive rights and Malagasy women’s reproductive realities. It also brings forth how abortion stigma pervades views on reproductive autonomy and legal reform on abortion among both abortion providers and women who have abortions.
... This narrative, rooted in neo-Malthusian ideology, shifts blame onto marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South (Schneider-Mayerson and Leong 2020:1018). Some interviewees, despite having environmental education and awareness, echoed this reductionist perspective (Bhatia et al. 2020;Sasser 2024). Unfortunately, a diverse array of individuals in this study spoke in these terms, showcasing how deeply entrenched this narrative of blame and shame of the Global South is. ...
... 32 Haraway, 2016Clarke, 2018. 33 Sasser, 2018Murphy, 2018;Ojeda et al., 2020;Bhatia et al., 2020. 34 UNFPA, 2012IPCC, 2014;O'Neill et al., 2009O'Neill et al., , 2012Bongaarts, 2018. ...
Although endangered future generations are omnipresent in discourses around climate change, the possibility to opt out of parenthood based on environmental reasons raises ambiguous reactions. Taking up two distinct registers that characterise stereotyped representations of “eco-reproductive” concerns, this article aims to re-complexify how ecologists connect reproduction and environmental crises. Mobilising ethnographic interviews conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland, I analyse how my interlocutors sometimes reproduce or break up with eco-Malthusian arguments. By extension, I explore what it tells us about their political views. Observing that they preconise collective action rather than individual ecological practices, I further interrogate their visions of the future. Producing “counter-Anthropocene” imaginaries more than nourishing a deliberate conviction in “collapse”, I argue that reconsidering parenthood allows them to deal with uncertainty and re-establish anticipation.
Contemporary struggles for reproductive rights across the globe once more show how politics shape intimate reproductive experiences. The intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice has become an important political and theoretical agenda to address power relations in the realm of reproductive rights. We argue that the justice-based approach of the concept can serve as an umbrella for debates taking place in diverse subdisciplinary fields such as feminist, Black, biopolitical, health, environmental, and abolition geographies. The concept of reproductive justice further allows to develop a multiscalar and activist spatial approach to questions of necro- and biopolitics. We hence call for and develop in this paper a reproductive justice research agenda for geography.
We analyze the normalization of tubal ligation in Mexico by examining both the institutional perspective of health professionals and the experiences of racialized mestiza women who opt for sterilization. Using qualitative methods, we conducted in-depth interviews with 25 low-income mestiza women who underwent sterilization, and six health professionals. Additionally, we held three art-based workshops and conducted observation in a state-subsidized hospital. Our research shows that surgical sterilization remains the most common form of contraception for racialized, low-income women in Mexico. The women we interviewed value tubal ligation, seeing it as the safest option after experiencing failures with reversible methods and health concerns. In this paper, we challenge the normalization of tubal ligation in Mexico by showing how the wide-spread use of sterilization can be considered what we call the afterlife of population control policies. Healthcare professionals still work under sterilization quotas and organize campaigns to meet set targets.
This paper examines the effect of the Mexico City Policy, also called the Global Gag Rule, in India. The Gag Rule is a high-profile example of a coercive federal funding policy. It prevents Global South NGOs that receive US federal aid from working on abortion. The 2017 re-instatement of the Gag Rule and its expansion in 2019 was expected to devastate abortion services, advocacy, and discourse in the Global South. However, India is a peculiar example of a Global South country that was not directly or significantly impacted. On the contrary, abortion access was expanded under the law, and NGO advocacy and coalition-building for expanding access to safe abortion services in India was renewed while the Gag Rule was active. Using qualitative interviews and a historical analysis, I examine the Gag Rule in interaction with country-level “reproductive governance” apparatus in India. I argue that the protection of abortion services and advocacy from the Gag Rule is a by-product of India’s mode of reproductive governance, which is built on population control, itself an outcome of a historical US-India financial relationship and continued nationalist interest in targeted control over reproduction of minority populations. I demonstrate that the impact of transnational Global North funding policies is thus variable and mediated by the pre-existing policy landscape and form of reproductive governance.
From 1919 through the early 1950s, agricultural scientists affiliated with the University of California and agricultural scientists setting up settlements in Mandatory Palestine traveled between California and Palestine on a series of research trips. Building on conversations in historical political ecology and critical political ecologies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, this article sets out to answer: how was agricultural science part of the project of settler colonialism in both California and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century? Through an analysis of archival materials – field notes, professional and personal correspondence, and scholarly and popular media publications by US and European Jewish Zionist scientists – I argue that these scientists naturalized and made universal racial hierarchies through transnational technoscientific collaboration. US and Zionist scientists engaged in exchange and debate in two topics: the proper physical organization of and location of farms, and; the concept of carrying capacity of the land of historic Palestine. In both, agricultural science was used as an objective reason to elevate Western ideologies of proper cultivation and capitalist yield. This justified the dispossession of Palestinians from their land because they were "poor stewards." This historical case study holds implications for contemporary issues around land and population by Zionists in Israel today, and related debates in global sustainable development at large.
In Making Sexual Stewards , Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. With an increasing focus on climate change coming to dominate news media and international development circles, population advocates have harnessed an opportunity to reframe population growth as an urgent source of climate crisis, and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) via funding international family planning policy. Making Sexual Stewards follows the network through a diverse range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—to investigate how the new population advocacy is constructed and circulated, while drawing on longstanding development narratives linking population growth to environmental scarcity and geopolitical instability. Sasser argues that this advocacy revolves around framing the sexual steward: a neoliberal development subject sitting at the nexus of discourses linking scientific knowledge production, creative donor advocacy, and youthful advocacy focused on global social justice.
In contrast to claims made by some, it is evident from recent, high‐profile family planning programmes that population control is not ‘history’, belonging to some troubled past. Rather, it persists in the troubled present alongside human rights and women's empowerment approaches. To make this argument, this article examines two family planning efforts which emerged from the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning: the ‘120 by 20’ target of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), and the Implant Access Program (IAP). These examples illustrate population control practices in today's family planning programmes and highlight their serious implications. First, there are shortcomings in conceptualizing population control as largely in the past. Second, the ‘120 by 20’ and IAP examples suggest that FP2020 as a whole merits critical inquiry. Third, FP2020 raises issues of contraceptive safety regarding both the methods promoted and their mass dissemination. Finally, the claim that population control is history blocks productive re‐visioning of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people as a development priority.
This book explores how conditions for childbearing are changing in the 21st century under the impact of new biomedical technologies. Selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) - technologies that aim to prevent or promote the birth of particular kinds of children – are increasingly widespread across the globe. Wahlberg and Gammeltoft bring together a collection of essays providing unique ethnographic insights on how SRTs are made available within different cultural, socio-economic and regulatory settings and how people perceive and make use of these new possibilities as they envision and try to form their future lives. Topics covered include sex-selective abortions, termination of pregnancies following detection of fetal anomalies during prenatal screening, the development of preimplantation genetic diagnosis techniques as well as the screening of potential gamete donors by egg agencies and sperm banks. This is invaluable reading for scholars of medical anthropology, medical sociology and science and technology studies, as well as for the fields of gender studies, reproductive health and genetic disease research.