Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi (eds.) Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. vii + 389 p. $99.00; 24.95 (pbk.).

Abstract

This impressive collection of scholarly essays appraises the post–World War II population policy experience of ten countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, and the United States (for some of them, with background material extending back decades). Its focus is the role of the state in what it terms population control—specifically, state actions seeking to lower or raise birth rates. The stance of the editors and authors is broadly feminist and strongly supportive of individual agency in reproductive decisions. The state, for the most part, is seen as infringing on reproductive rights, sometimes through outright coercion. And implicated in its actions, where reducing high fertility is the goal, is a population movement comprising Western (largely American) NGOs, population-bomb alarmists, and family planning activists, backed by government aid agencies and the UN. To some degree undermining the conspiratorial current of this narrative is the parallel assertion that however energetic the action, the demographic achievement was minimal. Rickie Solinger, in her introductory essay, cites historian Matthew Connelly's book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008) as attesting to this policy ineffectiveness, and she characterizes the subsequent essays as continuing “the project of cataloging the failures of population control.” Connelly's book, a significant work of scholarship that is drawn on by several of the contributors, offers a critical perspective on the family planning enterprise that contrasts sharply with the often celebratory tone of many other accounts of the global fertility transition (it received a mixed reaction from population specialists—see the review symposium in PDR 34, no. 3). Another intellectual antecedent is evident in the authors’ deployment of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. Policy failure is evident enough in several of the contributions. The grim history of Soviet census-taking and demographic analysis under Stalin is recounted, as is the futile subsequent official efforts to reverse the rapid abortion-led drop in birth rates. In Brazil, the fertility transition is represented as the victory of feminism over decades of state pronatalism as captured in the slogan “governing is to populate.” An enlightening study of Nigeria details the many benefits that 25 years of family planning activities have bestowed on government officials and funding agencies while having negligible effect on the country's high fertility levels. It remarks caustically that the 2012 “London Summit” endorsed “a return to a strategy that did not work in the past.” The nearest to a family planning success story in the volume is Iran, where the emphasis is put on the increasing access to birth control methods, only briefly interrupted after the revolution, rather than (at least as plausible) describing a demand-led transition. Egypt's experience, in contrast, by conventional accounts “the triumphant product of an incremental and evolutionary population policy” (fertility falling from 7 in the 1960s to below 3), is decried as the intrusion of the modern state into the everyday lives of its citizens. The reproductive rights premise has firm backing in UN declarations, though qualified there by the stipulation that individual actions must be “responsible.” For most of the authors here, however, the notion of a valid societal interest in a country's own demographic future is accorded little weight. The family planning movement's contributions to reproductive health and the benefits to well-being of access to modern contraceptive services are both acknowledged, but grudgingly. The contributors are scholars in history, anthropology, and women's studies rather than demography. Rickie Solinger is an independent scholar and writer on reproductive politics, based in New York; Mie Nakachi is a Russian specialist at Hokkaido University. The chapters are elaborately footnoted, but regrettably there is no consolidated bibliography; in part compensation, there is a good index.—G.McN.