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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Controlling reproduction – who has children, how many, and when – is important to states, communities, families, and individuals across the globe. However, the stakes are even higher than might at first be appreciated: control over reproduction is an incredibly powerful tool.
Contests over reproduction necessarily involve control over women and their bodies. Yet because reproduction is so intertwined with other social processes and institutions, controlling it also extends far into most corners of social, economic, and political life. Nancy Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee explore how various social institutions beyond the individual – including state, religion, market, and family – are involved in the negotiation of reproductive power. They draw on examples from across the world, such as direct fertility policies in China and Romania, the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and Brazil, racial discrimination and resistance in Mexico and the US, and how Japan and Norway use laws intended to encourage gender equality to indirectly shape reproduction.
This engaging book sheds new light on the operations of power and gender in society. It will appeal to students taking courses on reproduction in departments of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 Introduction: Controlling Women, Controlling Reproduction
Defining Gender and Reproduction
Importance of Reproduction
Controlling Reproduction
Forms of control, levels of control
Multiple Influencers: The Role of the State and Other Actors
Contest over Reproduction and the Problem of Choice
Resistance
Outline of Chapters
Notes
2 Direct State Control of Reproduction
China’s “One-Child Policy”
Romania: Coercive Pronatalism
Using Incentives and Disincentives in India
Notes
3 Religion and the State
Poland: Church and State Collaboration on Reproductive Policies
Brazil
Egypt: State Cooptation of Islamists
Morocco: Women’s Interpretations of Islam
US Reproductive Politics and the Role of the Religious Right
Resistance
Notes
4 State and Family: Cooperation and Contestation
Birth Control, Family Constraints, and Women’s New Lives
Motherhood in Latin America
Resisting Family Pressure in Japan
Support for Families in Norway
Caught between Family and State in China
5 State Management of Reproduction in the Making and Unmaking of Communities
Shaping Reproduction and Population in the US
Restricting Who Comes and Stays: The Role of Immigration in Constructing America
Controlling Reproduction within the US
Controlling the poor
Native American reproduction in the context of settler colonialism
Devaluing African American women and motherhood
Reproduction in US Empire-Building
Marginalized Groups beyond the US
Migrants in Japan
Demographic nationalism in Italy
Designer genes in Singapore
Reproduction and religious nationalism in India
Reproduction: The View from Marginalized Communities
Women and the struggles of an indigenous village in Mexico
Fertility of Palestinians in Israel
Conclusions
Notes
6 Control of Reproduction in a Neoliberal World
What is Neoliberalism?
Debt and Economic Crisis in the Philippines
Learning to Value Individualism in Egypt
Cairo ICPD, and Feminist Perspectives
The Girl Effect as Smart Economics
Conclusions
7 The Global Interconnections of
Reproscapes
The Influence of the Global North
Knowing a population through data
Aid to countries to plan families
The global gag rule
The Spreading Influence of Neoliberalism
Stratified Reproduction
ART
Trade in sperm and eggs
Surrogacy
Transnational adoption and the Hague Convention
The Global Care Chain
Notes
8 Looking Ahead
The Promise of Resistance
What Does the Future Hold? Insights from Feminist Speculative Fiction
Final Thoughts
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1.
Posters promoting family planning from the early 1970s: “Practice birth c...
Figure 2.2.
Romania: effect of abortion restrictions, and then their lifting, on maternal mo...
Figure 2.3.
“Small Family Happiness”: poster from the Mass Education Media Div...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1.
Materials promoting the All-Poland Women’s Strike (Strajk Kobiet)
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1.
Total fertility rate (TFR) in Japan: below-replacement fertility has continued f...
Figure 4.2.
Wives’ and husbands’ average housework hours per week by wives...
Figure 4.3.
Trends in proportion of those never married at age 50, Japan
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1.
Forced sterilization rates in North Carolina, by race and sex
Figure 5.2.
Forced sterilization rates of institutionalized patients, California
Figure 5.3.
Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, various countries
Figure 5.4.
Maternal mortality statistics by race/ethnicity, USA 2018
Figure 5.5.
Average number of children a woman is expected to bear in her lifetime, by relig...
Figure 5.6.
Fertility rates in Israel
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1.
Sample questions from the DHS program in India
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Controlling Reproduction
Women, Society, and State Power
Nancy E. Riley
Nilanjana Chatterjee
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Nancy E. Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee 2023
The right of Nancy E. Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3991-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3992-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935233
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures
2.1. Posters promoting family planning from the early 1970s: “Practice birth control for the revolution” and “It is a revolutionary requirement to marry late”
2.2. Romania: effect of abortion restrictions, and then their lifting, on maternal mortality rate
2.3. “Small Family Happiness”: poster from the Mass Education Media Division of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 1992
3.1. Materials promoting the All-Poland Women’s Strike (Strajk Kobiet)
4.1. Total fertility rate (TFR) in Japan: below-replacement fertility has continued for decades
4.2. Wives’ and husbands’ average housework hours per week by wives’ weekly employment hours, Japan 2009
4.3. Trends in proportion of those never married at age 50, Japan
5.1. Forced sterilization rates in North Carolina, by race and sex
5.2. Forced sterilization rates of institutionalized patients, California
5.3. Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, various countries
5.4. Maternal mortality statistics by race/ethnicity, USA 2018
5.5. Average number of children a woman is expected to bear in her lifetime, by religion, India
5.6. Fertility rates in Israel
7.1. Sample questions from the DHS program in India
Acknowledgments
This book is rooted in an intensely intellectual comradeship and treasured friendship spanning three decades. We salute each other’s effort across time, space, political and social upheaval, and quotidian distraction to imagine the project and write it into reality together.
Nila acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the memory of her parents Ranji and Manju, and to her sister Radha who made her a reader. She thanks her husband Wil and son Nikhil for heated dinner table discussions which remind her that thinking critically is a life skill and an art form. Nancy thanks Bob for his tolerance of her wild ideas and Maggie, whose fierce commitment to social justice inspires Nancy daily.
We thank all those who helped on this book. Jonathan Skerrett has been a wonderful editor throughout this project – giving us free rein for much of our work, but pushing and questioning when he needs to. Others at Polity have also helped the book along: thanks to Karina Jákupsdóttir, Neil de Cort and the production team, and Sarah Dancy for her great copyediting. Many thanks to Bob Gardner for constructing the index. We also thank the outside reviewers for their care and suggestions as they read the manuscript.
We also thank colleagues Sara Dickey, Deb DeGraff, and Jan Brunson; our conversations and work with them have allowed us to think better about many issues related to reproduction. Belinda Kong’s insights and advice strengthened the last chapter. Mary Jane Riley contributed to our thinking about cover images. Thanks to Lori Brackett for all her help on so many things and to the wonderful Bowdoin College library staff for just the kind of support we needed. Students have also taught us about different ways to think about and work for reproductive justice. A special shout-out to the students in Nancy’s Reproductive Health and Politics class over the years, and to individual students – Theo Hurley, Brooke Bullington, Amanda Burrage, Meghan Bellerose, and Joy Lee among them – for knowing the importance of these issues and, especially, for their willingness to work toward a just world.
The heart of our book is about a woman’s control of reproduction and we dedicate it to women fighting for dignity and empowerment in the process. Their struggles against enormous odds, challenges won and lost, are a testament to resilience and resolve and fundamentally about human rights. These are the stories we want to share in the classroom and with a wider readership – to stir imagination and, perhaps, action.
Prologue
The ongoing struggles in the United States around reproductive justice, access to abortion, and other reproductive services underscore the central issues of this volume. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, removing the constitutional protection for abortion that had existed for fifty years. That ruling, and individual states’ responses to the ruling, makes clear just how powerful the state remains in controlling reproduction, even as other entities (religion, family, corporations, NGOs) play a role. In the US, religion, politics, state power, and resistance are all involved in what kind of access and control individuals will have over their own reproductive decisions. While many have seen spring 2022 as a time of acute crisis for reproductive control in the US, in fact, assaults on access to reproductive services have been ongoing for years. Because of local laws, many people have long lived in areas with little or no access to abortion. But the removal of federal protection for abortion has highlighted just how deeply threatened is women’s control of their reproduction and their right to bodily autonomy. More than two-thirds of the US population were born after 1973 and have always lived with abortion as a constitutional right. The overturning of Roe will likely result in abortion being banned in half of all individual US states. Such bans will change lives and assumptions in fundamental ways that have been unimaginable by many.
Although abortion in other countries is regulated, the US’s increasingly restrictive laws make it an outlier in the world today. Only three other countries have moved in that direction since 1994, while fifty-nine countries have expanded abortion access (Miller and Sanger-Katz 2022). As we discuss in this book, the outsized role the US plays in reproductive politics, access, services, and information across the world means that what happens there impacts people well outside the country’s borders – in the health services funded or provided by the US and in the ways that the actions there may encourage other countries to act in similar disregard of women’s human rights. The international attention garnered by the US Supreme Court ruling on abortion is testament to the large US influence on reproductive politics across the globe.
The politics of reproduction in the US and elsewhere is fluid and constantly shifting, again pointing to just how important the control of reproduction is to the state, to local governments, families, and individuals. Struggles around these issues will continue, with those in power grabbing control when possible, and those with less power – in marginalized communities, or among ordinary citizens – refusing to surrender the right to control their own reproduction. The changing landscape in the US has spurred many – individuals, organizations, and states – to action. Their efforts to find ways to shore up abortion access to as many as possible is another example of the resistance that arises when reproductive control is threatened. We know most readers – like we ourselves – will be watching as these struggles play out in the US and across the world.
Nancy Riley and Nila Chatterjee
July 2022
1Introduction: Controlling Women, Controlling Reproduction
In 1984, in the revised (New) Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective argued that reproduction and its control were central to women’s lives as social citizens. The authors wrote, “Unless we can decide whether and when to have children, it is difficult for us to control our lives or participate fully in society” (p. 291). Ten years later, the Beijing Declaration at the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women similarly argued that “the explicit recognition and reaffirmation of the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment” (UN Women 1995). In this book, we examine the power of reproduction and the importance of the struggle to control it.
Like other feminists over the past many decades and throughout the world, we see reproduction as central to how women and gender are constructed and to the role of women in social life. In societies across the world, the continuing struggles over control of reproduction have involved many people, organizations, and institutions: churches and mosques, schools, health institutions, businesses, government agencies, families, NGOs, as well as individual women themselves. We argue that early feminists were right in seeing reproduction as central to women’s place in their societies. But while we recognize the importance of reproduction to individual women, in this book we go beyond the level of individuals and focus on ways that broader social forces and institutions have been involved in reproduction and its control. At the same time, we examine how these larger social processes are linked to and influence the most intimate and individual levels of social life. We keep in mind that the direction of influence goes in both directions: reproduction is both shaped by and shapes all social institutions.
If we accept the premise that reproduction is central to women’s lives and to their ability to live as engaged social citizens, we can then widen our lens and change its focus and ask: if you control the reproduction of a population or a group of people, what is it you control? We argue that reproduction is so powerful and so intertwined with other social processes and institutions that control of reproduction means control of women, who sit at the center of nearly all reproductive processes. But the importance of reproduction and its control means that these processes also shape most corners of social, economic, and political life, thus the social world well beyond reproduction itself. As another feminist scholar working in this field has argued: “How societies handle human reproduction … shapes hierarchy and subordination on the basis of class, gender, age, race, and a host of other social orderings, and is a core concern of the social policies of states” (Sen 1994: 5).
The stakes are high for women, families, communities, and nations in this process; in her investigation of reproductive control in Romania, Gail Kligman wrote, “In view of the multiple interests and values attached to reproduction it is understandable that … individual, familial, and political interests in reproduction differ so dramatically … [Reproductive] issues constitute a focus for contestation within societies as well as between them” (1998: 5). Further, because it is women who are most involved in all aspects of reproduction, the imperative of reproductive control means that all aspects of women’s lives are under scrutiny, regulation, and control as well. Early American feminists who argued that “the personal is political” were right to point to how individual lives are also entwined with processes at the levels of family, community, nation, and globe.
At the center of control of reproduction – and of our own inquiry and analysis – is the modern state (Foucault 1978, 1991; Gal and Kligman 2000), long a principal player in reproductive politics and outcomes. While there are many forces that influence reproduction in any society, including family and religion – and we address those forces too – most of those forces find their way into, through, or out of state practices and regulations. The state has a vital interest in reproduction for many reasons: reproduction is often linked to economic structures, policies, and goals; how the state envisions the nation and who is and is not included in that vision usually revolves around reproduction; and the way that state control of population – size, growth, and composition – is often deemed the purview of the modern state and acted on through policies, regulations (or their absence) that directly or indirectly affect reproduction. In our focus on state involvement, we see the state not as a monolith or universal across time and place, but, rather, as a set of processes that are “evolving, dialectic, and dynamic” (Waylen 1998: 7), intertwined with the surrounding society; state practices and outcomes do not arise independently but are integrally connected to and arise from the norms, values, practices, and ideologies of the social institutions and communities among which the state resides.
Throughout this volume, we trace and analyze how states are involved in processes shaping reproduction and show how states influence gender, reproduction, and their connections both directly and indirectly. State involvement in reproduction has changed in recent decades; with the spread of neoliberal capitalism, we see a decline in direct state involvement in this and many other aspects of social life. Nevertheless, even as the state’s role in society has undergone change, efforts to control reproduction have not disappeared, but have taken on new, or related, forms (Foucault 1978, 1991; Harvey 2005; Scott 1999).
We draw examples from across the globe and, in doing so, highlight how “reproductive governance,” as it is sometimes called (Morgan and Roberts 2012), comes in many shapes and forms. Reproductive control has both a structural and an ideological aspect to it, and we examine how those pieces are related and supported. We address coercive efforts to control population (because the state believes fertility is too low or too high, we discuss examples of both), but also the less coercive means (and programs) that control population/fertility, which have been much more common in recent decades. These latter programs include those that run through the state, such as economic interventions (e.g., tax breaks for those who have kids) and programs or the lack of them (maternity leave, child care). But with the decline in states’ power under neoliberal capitalism, nonstate forces, such as NGOs, corporations, and other private sector institutions, have become especially important.
We do not see the state as always opposite to or antagonistic toward women. But at the same time, it is nearly always women who are most affected by reproductive governance policies, practices, and outcomes. While men are also involved in reproduction, and reproductive politics affect men as well – especially through how reproduction is connected to the ways masculinity is constructed – it is the physicality of reproduction that is specific to women’s place in reproductive politics; it is women who get pregnant or do not, who carry babies to term, who bear children. It has nearly always been women and their bodies that have been targeted in family planning and fertility control programs, and we will make that case through our examples. We will be exploring the reasons why women have been the focus not only for some of the obvious physiological reasons but also because they are often seen as the keepers of culture; their role in reproduction is thus explicitly connected to the goals of state and nation. “Women are often the ones who are given the social role of intergenerational transmitters of cultural traditions, customs, songs, cuisine and, of course, the mother tongue (sic!)” (Yuval-Davis 1993: 627; emphasis in original). The patriarchal1 organization and ideology that structure societies are also key: although in most societies men have power that women do not, especially in the public spheres, there is also power in reproduction; thus, controlling that reproductive power is important in maintaining gender hierarchy. Within a neoliberal framework, with its focus on individuals (and the importance of individuals making good choices), women continue to be the targets of population and reproductive governance today. Even some of the more “feminist” turns in population control (e.g. the Cairo [1994] and Beijing [1995] UN Conferences on Population and Women, respectively) use this neoliberal framework – promoting women’s “empowerment” (a focus on individual efforts) rather than efforts to dismantle the larger systems of inequality.
Throughout the book, we will be applying a “sociological imagination” (Mills 2000 [1959]): connecting individuals and larger social processes and institutions. Thus, while the state or the global economy might be involved in state policies, they also influence the daily lives of individuals, women, and families. We will also be drawing on Foucault’s (1978, 1991, 2004) arguments about population, particularly issues of biopolitics and governmentality. “Biopolitics allows for conceiving power as not merely top down but as diffuse, such as when individuals become subject to norms of behavior and may internalize those norms yet also modify them as they do so” (Krause and De Zordo 2012: 139). We analyze how reproduction and its control move across the many levels of society: in the geopolitical sphere; at the state level, involving social institutions such as family and religion; at the individual level – these various levels of society interact with and respond to one another. In the next pages, we outline the major frameworks that we use throughout the volume.
Defining Gender and Reproduction
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (Beauvoir 1979: 301). Her statement makes the argument for understanding gender as a social construction that is shaped by society. In that way, “gender is not a set of traits, not a variable, or a role, but the product of social doings of some sort … gender itself is constituted through interaction … gender [is] exhibited or portrayed through interaction, and thus [is] seen as ‘natural,’ while it is being produced as a socially organized achievement” (West and Zimmerman 1987). As a social construction, what constitutes male or female, what is expected of women and men, and how behavior is interpreted as gendered will all depend on the social and historical context. Though women and men have different bodies, gender is shaped beyond those bodies and is not simply tied to biological traits. The feminist historian Joan Scott put it this way: gender is “a social category imposed on a sexed body” (1988: 32). And as Scott continues her argument, “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (1988: 42). In later writing, she expanded on this, arguing that we need to think “critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed” (2010: 10).
A key aspect of gender is power; gender can be seen as “a primary way of signifying relations of power” (Scott 1988: 42). Gender orders social relationships in such a way that some individuals have greater power than others. “Power to” allows individuals access to things, opportunities, and events. Compared to men, women often have less “power to” – to go to school, to get training, or to move freely in public areas. Another kind of power might be described as “power over” – the ability to influence others in particular ways. Thus, in most societies, men occupy positions of power and decision in government, in religious organizations, and in the economic sector. That positioning gives males more power than women to direct courses of action, policies, and individual lives (Riley and DeGraff 2018).
Although we recognize the role that gender plays in the lives of individuals, we also must recognize that gender’s larger influence lies beyond the individual. At the individual level, we can note the differences between women and men – that men are more likely to do some jobs than others, or that women face discrimination in schooling or the job market. But gender is a social institution, a set of social and cultural practices that shape all aspects of society, including its economic, political, and social arenas. That points to how the very structure of society is gendered. For example, men’s role in the labor market has important ramifications for men, for women, for their families. But the larger influence of gender in the labor market may be the way that the economy is structured around gender so that it mirrors the expected ways that men live and work, and is unable to accommodate other versions of work and family, ones that reflect women’s lives. Workers are expected to work long hours or be at their employers’ beck and call because employers assume these workers are supported by women who care for the home and children. When women move into the labor market, they often continue to carry the responsibility of child care and housework. That makes it particularly difficult for them to balance the expectations of good worker and good mother/wife. In this volume, we pay particular attention to the social institution of gender, and how gender and reproduction are constructed together.
Even as gender emphasizes the social aspects of individuals’ gendered lives, it is also true that reproduction – also a biological process – is central to gender across the world. Reproduction and gender are so interwoven, it is almost impossible to think about what it means to be a woman without thinking in terms of reproduction (Flavin 2009: 3). Even as norms and expectations around reproduction vary greatly across space, time, community, and era, reproduction has served to help define and shape women’s lives, acting to constrain or expand their roles in all societies. In the nineteenth century, American women who were married were not allowed to practice law or take the bar exam that would give them licensure to do so. In Bradwell v. Illinois, the US Supreme Court denied Myra Bradwell the right to practice law, arguing that women’s rightful place was in the home, taking care of children, and that participating in the law would interfere that that duty (Vogel 1993: 11ff.). In some societies today, education of young women is still seen as potentially interfering with their more important roles as mothers and wives (Lewis 2019).
In this volume, we are most focused on biological reproduction – events and actions surrounding pregnancy and birth. But social reproduction – defined as the processes necessary for the continuance and maintenance of any society – is also important. We address aspects of these processes throughout the book, with particular attention to those involving reproductive labor: among them, the raising and caring of infants and children; feeding and housing of community members; care of ill and elderly community members; and the construction and maintaining of community ties. The ways these processes are vital to community and individual survival reinforces the overall importance of reproduction more generally.
Of course, reproduction does not involve only women; men participate in reproductive processes and their lives are also shaped by reproduction, often in key ways. But, again, when we talk about control of reproduction, women remain the central players. As Almeling (2015: 426) argues, “responsibility for reproduction is lodged within women’s physical bodies.” Thus, even as there are others involved in reproduction, and even as it is the social aspects of reproduction that concern us in this volume, it is how reproduction, with its obvious and necessary biological components, is a process particularly located in women’s bodies that remains key. It is these social and biological interactions and connections that make clear that controlling reproduction and controlling women move in parallel fashion in any society. We thus focus on women and reproduction as we work to understand how these bodily processes and their connections and meanings are also shaped and interpreted by the social world.
Just as gender operates at different levels of any society, so too does reproduction operate at multiple levels and sites. And these levels and sites are interlinked.
At the level of bodies … biological and social processes [are] associated with genes, cells, organs, and entire organisms. At the level of the individual [are] the biological and social processes associated with identities and experiences. [or] … the interactions … between family, friends, educators, employers, clinicians, and any others relevant to the biological and social process of reproduction. Finally, [reflecting reproduction’s role in] historical, structural, and cultural processes … biological and social processes [are] associated with states, markets, medicine, media, religions, social movements, and cultural norms … Biological and social processes come together at the level of the individual, the family, the clinic, the market, and the state. (Almeling 2015: 431)
Reproduction organizes institutions from the family to the economy to the state, and tracing the importance of reproduction and its control necessitates attention to different institutions and levels of societal organization. Using multiple lenses allows us to investigate how “seemingly distant power relations … shape local reproductive experiences” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995: 2; see also Murphy 2017).
Importance of Reproduction
Because of the centrality of reproduction to the organization and future of all social and economic institutions, the stakes are high around reproduction at all levels of society and across the world. Its importance underscores how reproduction is both a private and a public issue. It operates in some of the most individual and protected areas of social life, and is at the same time part of any society’s organization and its economy, and part of global politics as well. Because women’s bodies are at the center of these politics, control of those bodies is sometimes seen to be the purview of the state or community and not the woman herself (Denbow 2015: 59). In these ways, “state policy and ideological control are experienced in everyday life” (Kligman 1998: 3, quoted in Gal and Kligman 2000: 17; see also Riley and McCarthy 2003).
Sometimes, it is at the individual level that it is most easy to see the importance of reproduction. It is a key piece of identity for any person (particularly a woman) in any society and often determines what roles she plays or is allowed to play; being a mother is often central to how women are defined as women (Inhorn 1996) or how they see their own value in the community (Edin and Kefalas 2007). But women have to navigate sometimes conflicting norms and expectations around motherhood. In Egypt, motherhood is so central to a definition of gender that women who are unable to bear a child violate the very definition of woman. As Inhorn explains, “a woman’s adult gender identity can only be completed through motherhood, since what makes a woman a woman is ultimately her ability to khallafa, to produce offspring for herself and husband, and to demonstrate her ability to mother these progeny appropriately” (1996: 60). Or, as one Egyptian woman explained: “We are created into this sex just to be mothers” (1996: 60). The way that gender identity and place is tied to reproduction helps to explain why some see infertile women as pseudo-males, closer to men than women (1996: 59). Even if motherhood is not as defining a status as in Egypt, in most societies, motherhood and womanhood are tightly linked. Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a woman?”2 was partly about claiming the womanhood she shared with other, non-enslaved women. She used her own experience as a mother to emphasize the evils of slavery, declaring, “I have borne thirteen children, and seen most sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” She addressed just how dehumanizing slavery was: she was a woman, but slavery meant she was not allowed to be a proper mother to her children.
At the family level too, reproduction is key. How many and when children are born are often vital to a family’s position in society, and sometimes to its future. In places like China, where the family line is traced through males (a patrilineal family structure), bearing sons for their husband’s family has been seen as women’s most important role in the family. A woman who was unable to produce a son could be divorced or sent back to her parents’ home for her inability to carry out her responsibility. But well beyond patrilineal societies like China, fertility has been seen as a central element of family organization, relations, and power. The Value of Children study, a large, multi-country study of six Asian and Pacific societies done in the 1970s, was part of widespread efforts to bring down national fertility rates, particularly in poorer countries (Arnold 1975). This study recognized that the goal of national fertility reduction was not always compatible with the needs and desires of families, who often wanted children for their own purposes. As one of the researchers involved in the project explained, policymakers had to find a way to balance parents’ desire for children, “while minimizing the number of children because of additional burdens they place on society, its institutions, and support systems” (Bulatao 1975: 204).
We can also see how women’s power in families is connected to their ability to control reproduction. While not bearing children – particularly sons – in China can result in women’s lesser power, in many societies (including China) being able to bear and raise children can be the basis of women’s power, especially where the family plays a strong role in organizing society and social life. In Indonesia, where interdependence on and with others, rather than autonomy, is most valued, women derive social power through their family roles, most importantly as mothers. Men may be more involved in political life outside the family, but Blackwood (2000) argues that women have outsized influence because of their central roles in the family. It is women who organize family activities around what they themselves see as most important, and they gain power through bearing and raising children, teaching them how to act and, through that work, reinforcing certain norms and not others (see also Riley and DeGraff 2018). Being able to control their own reproduction options gives women a stronger place in the family and community.
The importance of reproduction, or the number and timing of children, can be expected to shift as a society undergoes change. Demographer John Caldwell (1976) has shown that, as societies move from family-based economies to market-based economies, the need for many children often decreases. In economies based on the family, those in power – usually elder males – want as many children as possible. More children bring more help in working the family farm or business, more profit for the family, and thus more power for the eldest male. Wealth flows upward to the older generation. But under a market economy, individuals are hired, evaluated, and compensated as individuals, not as family members. In that case, having a lot of children will not benefit the family, nor will it benefit the older generation. Indeed, Caldwell argues, wealth flows toward children, who need education and training to be competitive in the new market economy. Under such conditions, even as children and reproduction remain important, having fewer children is often better for the family.
Reproduction is also important to any society. Reproduction is necessary to any community’s very future. Population numbers can influence the strength and stability of a society; when a population is too large or too small, growing too slowly or too quickly can threaten its stability or strength. As we will see in later chapters, some communities that feel vulnerable to outside forces – whether those are cultural, economic, or political – see high fertility as vital to their very survival. While in the past, the focus of leaders might have been on how much land they controlled, over the past century or more, states are more focused on population – its size, shape, productivity, and, in many places, its composition (Foucault 1978; Gal and Kligman 2000). Population became an entity that could be measured, known, and the subject of control (Foucault 1991; Murphy 2017; Hacking 2015 [1983]). The size and quality of that population are regularly seen as connected to modernist goals and a country’s place on the world stage. In Morocco, for example, “the control of reproduction continues to be seen as a foundation for development in Morocco – if population growth is not controlled, there will not be enough academic and professional opportunities for children as they become older; this would hinder the country’s role in global politics and economics” (Hughes Rinker 2015: 233).
In addition to concern about numbers is a concern about “population quality.” Sometimes referring to level of education or type of job, quality can also be used in ways that signal concerns about racial or religious composition of a population. These issues might arise over immigration policy. Germany, for example, has debated whether to allow more refugees and immigrants from Syria and Iraq. While some of the discussion is about the effects of the newcomers on the economy, much of it – explicitly or implicitly – is about race and religion and about who Germany is willing to accept as a citizen. Organizations such as Pergida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) have argued that Germany will be harmed if it allows itself to become more heterogeneous; Pergida regularly protests against the admission of Muslim refugees into Germany (Eckner 2018). In this volume, we look at several societies, including the United States, Palestine, Singapore, and India, to examine the rhetoric that focuses on who is bearing children and who is not, addressing how control of reproduction is linked to questions of “population quality,” citizenship (both legal and social), and the imagining of what and who constitutes the “nation.” Gal and Kligman (2000: 25) elaborate: “In this process, some forms of reproduction are defined as the sole legitimate, genuine, authentic means of national reproduction.”
Population, births, and reproduction have also all played an important role in global politics throughout recent centuries. Colonial powers were always interested in the numbers of people, births, and deaths in their colonies, and worked to keep those numbers in line with their own needs and expectations. But long after the colonial era ended, western powers remained interested in demographic issues in the Global South,3 perhaps even more so than previously, especially after birth rates in their own countries had begun to decline. After World War II, concerns and worries arose about how population size and growth in countries in the Global South might lead to an imbalance in world political power (Davis 1944). Such anxieties led to a massive population control effort, led and funded by powerful western countries, and mostly focused on the world’s poorest countries. For example, we will see how the development of India’s family planning program over the past several decades reflects these global actors, forces, and concerns. Partly because of those concerns, India’s population program – the first national program in the world – was originally funded by US sources, and the US retained an important role throughout many decades. Even as India worked to assert itself and its independence in this area, the program continued to be shaped by global forces. US involvement in population size and family-planning programs in countries like India was partly about helping to reduce population growth rates in the hope that that would help the country develop economically. But it also came from a concern that a growing population in the Global South could mean a change in the balance of world power. As one demographer wrote, these demographic changes would mean that, “to the extent that numbers are a factor in the distribution of economic and political power, there will be some redistribution of power from old to new centers” (Kirk 2000 [1943]: 595; see also Connelly 2009). Even as many of these programs provided local women with more access to contraception that then allowed them to take more control over their own reproduction, because many family planning programs were introduced and often run by western powers, they brought with them new norms and expectations that sometimes aligned with and sometimes clashed with local norms, values, and expectations.
Geopolitics continues to play a role in reproduction, as we discuss in detail in Chapter 7. We examine the “global gag rule,” a US injunction that prohibits discussion of abortion with clients by any organization that gets US funding. Because so many poorer countries rely on US funding for development and health programs, this move has had huge impacts on women’s lives (Filipovic 2017). It is one of many examples of how the US is able to export its own values around reproduction and abortion to places far from its own shores. In Chapter 7, we also discuss other ways that reproductive processes have been spread across the world and shaped the lives of women and others. Stratified reproduction draws our attention to the ways that different practices – including new reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, and other practices – means that reproduction sometimes involves more than one (or two) people. The buying and selling of gametes, the hiring of surrogates and the adoption of children across national borders reflects the increasing commercialization of reproduction and its many elements, often in ways that reflect social and economic inequalities. The global care chain (Hochschild 2000) is also a reflection of how global capitalism has organized reproductive labor – here the care of children, the ill, and the elderly – so that those with means can purchase the labor of others, usually women.
Today, reproduction continues to be multileveled in its importance. Individuals seek fertility goals in the context of social norms around reproduction, have more or less access to the means to control pregnancies, and experience pressures from family, community, state, and others. Even as families take on new forms in many societies, reproduction remains at the center of how families are defined, monitored, or ignored. And at country and global levels, reproduction is as important as ever. Where once the emphasis among demographers and policymakers was on “too-high” fertility, we are as likely today to hear about fertility being “too low,” or to hear concerns about which people are having too many or not enough children. Marginalized groups, particularly immigrants, have been targets of concern in many locations, where their reproduction is seen to threaten the status and health of a society in some of the same ways that reproduction in the Global South was of concern in previous decades.
Controlling Reproduction
Given the importance of reproduction to constructions of gender, to the organization of family, state, and society, it is not surprising that many entities have worked and continue to work to control reproduction. Contestations around control of reproduction occur because of sometimes contradictory goals or visions of reproduction or population on the part of states, other social institutions such as religion or family, and individuals as well.
Forms of control, levels of control
Control (of reproduction and women) takes on both structural and ideological forms. For example, tax laws might act as a way to encourage or discourage parents from having more or fewer children, with some governments offering tax bonuses for large families and others punishing large families with high taxes. But equally influential might be social norms that discourage behavior or family size or something else, beyond a prescribed model. In some villages in Sicily in the early 1900s, a smaller family began to be seen as a modern family (Schneider and Schneider 1996). In this new era, those parents with many children were often socially sanctioned by their neighbors. But with no reliable contraception available, husbands and wives might have to rely on refraining from sex to limit their family size. If they ended up with many children, it was suggested they had not been able to “control themselves” sexually, bringing disapproval from those around them. That social pressure was a key factor in reducing fertility in these areas.
Control and its attempts can be systematic, explicit, and visible, and can be coercive and even violent. Perhaps the most extreme example of violent control over women, their bodies, and their reproduction is when rape is used as an act of war. Raping women and girls in such situations is considered an attack not only on the individual women, but on the group itself. If women are seen as the keepers of culture, and their children seen as the future of the community, rape is, then, an attack on that culture and community as a whole, and impregnation by the dominant group acts as a form of ethnic cleansing. The use of rape “as an instrument of terror” received heightened international attention and opprobrium after Serbian forces systematically used rape as a strategy during the Bosnian War (1992–5); in that conflict, it is estimated that between 12,000 and 50,000 women were raped as part of Serbian forces’ attempt to erase the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) population (Salzman 1998). After international tribunals investigating these acts indicted some of those involved in the Bosnian War, in 2008, the United Nations Security Council went on to declare Resolution 1820, classifying rape and other sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most control of reproduction is not as violent as that of rape, but some state measures are explicit and coercive. We will see how state control of reproduction was strong in both Romania – where state measures required women to produce more babies – and China – where the state restricted women from having children beyond the one or two that were allowed. In recent decades, most states and organizations have moved away from direct control of population, and the rhetoric connected to it. But that does not mean that these states and organizations have discontinued efforts to control population – and women’s bodies – but rather that control comes in new forms or language. Control can come through the less direct and less obvious paths of legislation, economics, shaping of social norms, rhetoric, and moral injunctions (Morgan and Roberts 2012), which can also be powerful in shaping reproduction. We see that less direct – but still powerful – form in several Nordic countries. There, the state has stepped in in various ways to support parents’ struggles to balance family and work lives. In all of these (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland), state provision of child care and parental leave is extensive, especially compared to what is found in other countries (Lammi-Taskula 2006). Many in these countries hope that such injunctions might have a positive effect in boosting the low fertility rates seen across the region, and encourage more couples to have children, and to have more children. But in some, like Denmark, the state hoped their policies could do more; to promote more fathers’ involvement in child care, they offered specific “daddy leaves” – parental leave only offered to fathers – to encourage fathers to stay home longer after their child is born, and therefore take a more active role in parenting (Borchorst 2006). Whether state provision of such measures as child care and parental leave can encourage more births, or a change in how parenting is done, remains under debate (Lammi-Taskula 2006).
The state’s interest in controlling reproduction sometimes supports and sometimes contests individual women’s efforts to control their own reproduction. With the development and introduction of reliable contraceptive methods and safe abortions, women in most societies have been able to wrench control over reproduction away from other institutions and employ these methods to reach their own reproductive goals. Reliable contraception, combined with a desire for fewer children, has resulted in the plummeting of total fertility rates (TFR)4 across the world over the past two centuries. Where the TFR was nearly 6 in 1800 – i.e., women had close to six children on average in 1800 – the TFR is now about 2.4. While different places experienced these declines earlier or later, or more quickly or more slowly, this vast change in reproduction signals fundamental change – in every aspect of social, political, and economic life. Where women once spent most of their lives in childbearing and childrearing, with fewer children, they have more time and energy to pursue other endeavors.
Such reproductive shifts do not lessen the importance of reproduction to all social institutions and individuals, and often bring with them further contestations about reproduction. Tracing the multiple reasons for fertility decline, we can see the likely players. We can assume that in some cases and places, fertility declines took place because states and other governing structures wanted birth rates and population growth to be lower. But it is also true – and often at the same time – that those fertility declines reflect the increasing access that women had to controlling their own reproduction. Reliable contraception meant that they could decide whether and when to get pregnant, whether to carry a fetus to term, and whether to stop childbearing altogether. Contraception freed women from the burden of repeated and often dangerous pregnancies, and has allowed the separation of sexual activity and pregnancy: a woman could enjoy sexual relations without fearing the consequence of pregnancy. That newfound freedom has been celebrated in society after society, as access to birth control became increasingly commonplace. But we point out that even as reliable and accessible contraception has given women newfound control of reproduction, that process has also resulted in less attention to the ways that forces beyond individuals are involved and can be a major factor in women’s control of reproduction. We elaborate on this in our discussion of “choice,” below.
Multiple Influencers: The Role of the State and Other Actors
Although in this book we highlight state involvement in reproduction, we will underscore throughout the volume the ways that influence on and control of reproduction comes from multiple sites, sometimes working together and sometimes in opposition to one another. As we have explained, there are many reasons that the state seeks to control reproduction and women’s bodies. At the same time, it is also important to keep in mind that, while the state has been powerful in the area of reproduction in most places and times, it rarely operates alone. Communities, social institutions such as the economy, education, families, and religion, as well as corporations and NGOs all play a role. This process involves a complex interweaving, with resistance and complicity from many sides. Norms, values, and expectations are connected to social structures and institutions and so these different levels of any society often work together to influence both reproduction and women’s lives more generally. Thus, family control of reproduction is usually linked – positively or negatively or both – to how the state regulates reproduction.
In our selection of examples, we make the case that, while the state plays a role in all modern societies, time and place are crucial to the kinds of reproductive control that are in play and to the outcome of those efforts. Different histories, government structures and forms, and different cultural values, norms, and beliefs all play a role, as do events, such as wars, colonial experience, mortality (epidemics, or general mortality levels), and geopolitical inequalities.
Religion and family are two social institutions that have often been involved in reproductive control. The Catholic Church, Islamic institutions such as mosques or Muslim clergy, ecumenical councils in Protestant sects, shamans, priests and local spiritual leaders, and other religious entities have regularly weighed in on reproduction – on what kind of intervention (birth control methods, abortion) are or are not acceptable according to their interpretation of religious dogma. These institutions have been just as powerful in encouraging or even dictating social forms around reproduction. Do women have to be married to have sexual intercourse? How is childbirth outside marriage considered? What are the expectations around same-sex relationships? Religion has played a central role in these and many other questions about reproduction and its context in most societies and in most eras of human history.
Families – both extended family or kin networks or nuclear families where husbands and wives might be the decision-makers – are also key social institutions in reproduction, especially given the way reproductive processes are shaped by and themselves shape family size, extent, members, and even power structures. Families can be bulwarks against state action, mitigating some of the force of the state or community. But it is as often the case that families make it difficult for women – as individuals – to achieve their own reproductive goals. Many women live within structures of patriarchy, in which men have, take, and are given more say in reproductive and other family outcomes. Here again, families – their shape and structure, what is accepted or denounced, and the roles that family members play – are shaped and shape the society around them.
The role that society plays in families is related to another influence on reproductive outcomes: social norms – the role of moral injunctions on reproduction is clear in how the media, the government, or others talk about the fertility or reproduction of particular groups of people. In some places, attention might be on those who are “too young” or “too old” to be having children; in other places, we hear questions about whether “poor women have the right to bear children” (Jencks and Edin 1985) with some arguing that motherhood in the US is sometimes considered a class privilege (Solinger 2001: 183). Norms, values, and sanctions are nearly always connected to more formal routes of enforcement such as policies, restrictions, and rules. Thus, for example, in the US, attitudes about which women should and which women should not have more children are reinforced by policies that make family planning available and low cost for women who receive government funding (“welfare”), but at the same time restrict government funding for treatment of infertility (Briggs 2017: 126ff.). In some Nordic countries, access to assisted reproductive technology is only allowed for heterosexual couples, making pregnancy or family-making difficult or impossible for others, such as lesbian couples or single women.
Values play a role in other population-focused programs too. Control of reproduction has become part of the rhetoric of the environmental movement. While attention to environmental crisis is necessary and important, some of the rhetoric of those in the field relies on a kind of “populationism” (Bhatia et al. 2020), a belief that population size is at the heart of environmental degradation. Notably missing in such an approach is attention to the way that how we abuse environmental resources plays a much larger role in the destruction of the environment. While it may not necessarily be deliberate, a discourse that focuses on population growth and fertility rates relies on old notions of “population bomb,” “overpopulation,” and the need for population control. That again puts a focus on controlling fertility – and women and their bodies – and diverts attention from the other sides of the environment–population equation, those that address how people use and abuse the earth’s resources, how the use of those resources is distributed unequally, and the ways our systems encourage such environmental destruction.
