Table Of ContentREPRODUCTIVE STATES
REPRODUCTIVE
STATES
global perspectives
on the invention and
implementation of
population policy
edited by
RICKIE SOLINGER
and
MIE NAKACHI
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of
Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
© Oxford University Press 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,
by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reproductive states : global perspectives on the invention and implementation
of population policy / edited by Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-931108-8 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-931107-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-19-939544-6 — ISBN 978-0-19-024562-7
I. Solinger, Rickie, 1947– , editor. II. Nakachi, Mie, editor.
[DNLM: 1. Population Control. 2. Internationality. 3. Public Policy.
4. Reproductive Health Services. HQ 766]
HB883.5
363.9—dc23
2015015602
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi
1. Biopolitics, Demographobia, and Individual Freedom:
Lessons from Germany’s Century of Extremes 33
Annette F. Timm
2. Bleeding across Time: First Principles of US Population Policy 63
Rickie Solinger
3. From Abortion to ART: A History of Conflict between the
State and the Women’s Reproductive Rights Movement in
Japan after World War II 98
Miho Ogino
4. From Gandhi to Gandhi: Contraceptive Technologies and
Sexual Politics in Postcolonial India, 1947–1977 124
Sanjam Ahluwalia and Daksha Parmar
5. Reproducing the Family: Biopolitics in Twentieth-Century Egypt 156
Omnia El Shakry
6. Iran’s Population Policies: A Historical Debate 196
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
7. Reproductive Statecraft: The Case of Brazil 218
Sonia Corrêa, Margareth Arilha, and Maísa Faleiros da Cunha
8. Interpreting Population Policy in Nigeria 260
Elisha P. Renne
vi Contents
9. Liberation without Contraception? The Rise of the Abortion
Empire and Pronatalism in Socialist and Postsocialist Russia 290
Mie Nakachi
10. China’s Population Policy in Historical Context 329
Tyrene White
Index 369
List of Contributors
sanjam ahluwalia is associate professor, Department of History and Women’s
and Gender Studies Program, Northern Arizona University. Her book, Reproductive
Restraints: Birth Control in Colonial India, 1887–1947, was copublished by Illinois
University Press and Permanent Black in 2008. She is currently working on a book
manuscript on the history of sexology in the twentieth century, while completing
research on the history and politics of contraceptive technologies in postcolonial
India.
margareth arilha is a researcher in reproductive health and population at the
Population Studies Center, the University of Campinas in Brazil. Since 1980 Arilha
has worked in the fields of gender, reproductive health, and public policy; she has also
served as regional advisor at the United Nations. She is a member of the Board of
Citizenship and Reproduction Committee, which works in the Brazilian Center for
Analysis and Planning.
sonia corrêa is founder of SOS-Corpo-Instituto Feminista para a Democracia
(Brazil) and was the coordinator for sexual and reproductive health rights of
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a southern hemi-
sphere feminist network (1992–2009). She is the coauthor of Sexuality, Health and
Human Rights.
maísa faleiros da cunha is demographer and researcher at the Population
Studies Center (NEPO), State University of Campinas in Brazil. Her work focuses
on historical demography, the slave family, regional history, quantitative methods,
and serial sources.
omnia el shakry teaches at the University of California, Davis, and is the author
of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt.
El Shakry’s research interests include gender and sexuality in the modern Middle
East, and she is a founding member of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program
at UC Davis.
firoozeh kashani-sabet teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. She has
written a number of books, including Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of
Motherhood in Iran, which received the 2012 book award from the Journal of Middle
East Women’s Studies for outstanding scholarship in the field of Middle East gender
studies.
viii List of Contributors
mie nakachi is research associate of the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at
Hokkaido University in Japan. Her publications focus on twentieth-century wom-
en’s reproduction in the context of demography, state policies, gender relations, wars,
and medicine. She is preparing a monograph, “Replacing the Dead: The Politics of
Reproduction and Demography in Soviet Russia.”
miho ogino, a leading historian of women and reproductive politics in Japan,
is the author of The Road to “Family Planning”: Politics Sorrouding the Reproduction
of Modern Japan. She recently retired from the Faculty of the Graduate School of
Global Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto.
daksha parmar is a doctoral student at the Centre of Social Medicine and
Community Health, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She
is working on a doctoral thesis, “Controlling Births and Limiting Population in
Maharashtra: 1920–1980.”
elisha p. renne is professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African
Studies at the University of Michigan. Renne’s research in Nigeria focuses on issues
relating to medical anthropology, gender relations, religion, and textiles. She is the
author and editor of many books including Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town.
rickie solinger is an independent scholar and curator. She is the author and
editor of ten books about reproductive politics and satellite subjects, including
Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.
annette f. timm is the author of The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin
and teaches at the University of Calgary.
tyrene white is the author of China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the
People’s Republic, 1949–2005, the editor of several volumes, and has written many
articles on rural politics and population policy in China. She teaches Politics at
Swarthmore College.
Introduction
Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi
A new Manhattan project is needed—not to build another atomic bomb
which might destroy the world, but a grand and noble project for k nowledge
and demographic understanding around the world—a project to defuse the
population bomb—so that mankind does not multiply itself into oblivion.
William Draper, 19661
A precise social analysis requires that we pay attention to the specific conditions
of history, culture, and locale that give any act of fertility control its meaning.
Rosalind Petchesky, 19902
T
he case studies in Reproductive States explore when and how many
of the world’s most populous countries invented and implemented
population policies in the twentieth century. The authors of these studies,
scholars specializing in the reproductive politics of Brazil, China, Egypt,
Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Nigeria, the USSR/Russia, and the United
States, consider those policies while at the same time offering reflections on
the demographic outcomes of those policies and their legacies. Population
policy, whether devised to increase or limit growth, most often centers on
national efforts to affect rates of reproduction for the total population or
for certain groups. It can also include efforts to encourage or discourage
immigration, broadly or narrowly; population movement within the state;
incarceration, and other matters having to do with the size, character, and
distribution of the population.
The essays in this volume focus on the first element: the official and orga-
nized policies that governments have pursued to control reproduction and
population since the mid-twentieth century. The core of these policies
