Teaching the ‘appropriate’ age for reproduction: from family planning to ‘life plan’

Abstract

This study explores how the idea of an ‘appropriate’ age for a woman to reproduce has been propagated through maternal and child health policies in Japan since the early post-war era. The notion of an ‘appropriate’ age emerged during the 1960s when a qualitative shift occurred in family planning, as local government classes for newlyweds began to emphasize the health risks associated with ‘elderly primipara’: childbirth in later life. Since the 1990s, the Japanese government has attempted to tackle the country’s declining fertility rate through pronatalism, outlining the reproductive difficulties that aging can engender and, from the 2010s, instructing young people to draw up their own ‘life plan’. However, as government recognition of child abuse has increased, a competing argument has emerged that pregnancy in young women should not be viewed as ‘appropriate’. This concept of an ‘appropriate’ age for reproduction is fluid, malleable and dependent on both social context and interpretation. I argue that governmental attempts to define an ‘appropriate’ age for pregnancy should be challenged: reproduction and child nurturing are unpredictable phenomena, in which social and biological factors shape individual experiences.