History of Medicine Population and Family Planning
by
Nicole Bourbonnais
  • LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0010

Introduction

Over the course of the twentieth century, population and family planning became the subject of intense political debates, transnational mobilization, and direct interventions in the intimate lives of people around the world. These activities were driven by a wide range of ideologies and agendas. Feminist demands for women’s rights, humanitarian concerns over maternal health, and radical visions of sexual liberation became entangled with eugenicist calls to control the “quality” of the race and neo-Malthusian warnings that rapid population growth would lead to poverty, conflict, environmental destruction, or a turn to communism. These concerns fueled the creation of early, small-scale clinics distributing diaphragms and foam powders; targeted eugenic sterilization programs; and, particularly from the 1950s onwards, the launch of wide-scale state family planning programs, distributing the pill and IUD en masse with support from major foundations and international aid agencies. These efforts intersected in many contexts with a very real demand for contraceptive methods among people hoping to limit their own fertility, for their own reasons. However, the underlying colonial, racist, sexist, and ableist ideologies behind many interventions also fueled a range of coercive practices and human rights abuses. Antiracist, anticolonial feminist health advocates thus saw the need to mobilize transnationally from the 1970s onwards, demanding an end to population control and outlining a broader framework for reproductive rights and justice. Their activism helped fuel a discursive paradigm shift in many contexts, but fears surrounding “overpopulation” continue to shape national and international politics today, particularly in the context of climate change. Scholars have approached the history of population and family planning from multiple entry points and scales of analysis. General Overviews, including Global Histories and Edited Volumes, provide an expansive understanding of the chronology and core variations of population and family planning on a global scale. National/Local Level Studies have provided deeply contextualized histories across different regions of the world (North America, South America and the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia are covered here). Transnational Histories have focused in on the role of Foundations, Federations and Experts and International Conferences in shaping this history, as well as the transnational circulation of Ideas, Models, and Materials and Contraceptive Methods.

General Overviews

Global Histories and Edited Volumes provide a great place to start in exploring the history of population and family planning debates, campaigns, and movements. By taking a broad scope and bringing together a wide range of case studies, these books allow us to see the truly global stretch of these movements across the twentieth century.

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