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All Our People
Population Policy With A Human Face
Klaus M. Leisinger and Karin Schmitt; Foreword by Robert S. McNamara
Island Press, 1994
Responding to those who argue that resources spent saving lives in impoverished and overpopulated regions are wasted, Klaus Leisinger and Karin Schmitt set forth the components of strategies that can bring down birth rates in an ethically acceptable way. They explain that development must: foster a political, legal, and economic environment that supports human development focus on the satisfaction of basic human needs improve the social status of women All Our People provides an in-depth, balanced treatment of such factors as human consumption patterns, the ethical issues surrounding population policy, and the role of women in development issues. The authors consider the wide range of conditions necessary to mitigate problems associated with population growth and the environment, including reformed attitudes and behavior patterns among people in industrial countries as well as global changes in economic, social, and political structures.
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America's Demographic Tapestry
Baseline for the New Millennium
Hughes, James W.
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Beneath the surface of public-policy concerns that seem temporary are powerful evolutionary forces with long-term effects. One of the most important of these is the profound demographic change taking place in America-change which has extraordinary social and economic consequences, and far-reaching public-policy implications for the future of the nation.

James W. Hughes and Joseph J. Seneca have assembled experts on demography, immigration, policy, and family life to explain and document both changes and prospects for changes. Contributors profile the contours of demographic change in America and identify select public-policy challenges arising from this change. They cover a wide range of demographic shifts-"baby booms" and "baby busts," rising immigration, increasing ethnic and racial diversity, the proliferation of different household configurations, economic upward mobility that stems from the information-age rather than the industrial economy, and suburban and sunbelt gains.

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Beyond the Numbers
A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment
Edited by Laurie Ann Mazur; Foreword by Timothy Wirth
Island Press, 1994

Beyond the Numbers presents a thought-provoking series of essays by leading authorities on issues of population and consumption. The essays both define the poles of debate and explore common ground beyond the polarized rhetoric.

Specific chapters consider each of the broad topics addressed at the International Conference on Population and Development held in September 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The essays are supplemented by sidebars and short articles featuring more-impassioned voices that highlight issues of interest not fully explored in the overviews.

As well as providing a sense of the difficulties involved in dealing with these issues, the essays make clear that constructive action is possible.

Topics covered include:

  • the interrelationships between population, economic growth, consumption, and development
  • the history of population and family planning efforts
  • gender equality and the empowerment of women
  • reproductive rights, reproductive health, family planning, health and mortality
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Changing the Boundaries
Women-Centered Perspectives On Population And The Environment
Janice Jiggins
Island Press, 1994

Changing the Boundaries explores gender relations with respect to education, reproductive health services, and agricultural resources -- three factors that are widely recognized as being central to the struggle for gender equity, population control, and environmental sustainability. As well as defining the role of women in the population-environment quandary, author Janice Jiggins explains how that role is the key to understanding issues of population and environment.

Throughout the volume, she makes extensive use of research, experience, and documentation that draws on the views and publications of women in the global South, much of which is available to development practitioners but is rarely found in academic libraries. Data, arguments, concepts, and analysis from a wide and varied range of sources are woven together to link the experience of women's daily lives with population policies and global environmental politics.

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China's Hidden Children
Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy
Kay Ann Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States.  It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter.
           
Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages.
           
The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.
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Conceiving Cuba
Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era
Andaya, Elise
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 First Michelle Rosaldo Prize for a First Book in Feminist Anthropology from the Association for Feminist Anthropology

Winner of the Adele E. Clarke Book Award from ReproNetwork​

After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families.

Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state.

Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.
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Consumption, Population, and Sustainability
Perspectives From Science And Religion
Edited by Audrey R. Chapman, Rodney L. Petersen, and Barbara Smith-Moran
Island Press, 1999

The combined contributions of science and religion to resolving environmental problems are far greater than each could offer working in isolation. Scientific findings are central to understanding the impact of human populations on the environment, but a more ecologically sustainable future will require radical changes in values, lifestyle choices, and consumption patterns -- a revolution that falls squarely within the domain of the religious community.

Consumption, Population, and Sustainability is an outgrowth of a conference sponsored jointly by the Boston Theological Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that brought together more than 250 scientists and people of religious faith to discuss the environmental impact of consumption patterns and population trends, and to consider alternative and more equitable value systems, economic arrangements, and technologies that will be necessary for achieving a more sustainable future. The book:

  • provides a brief history of the dialogue between science and religion on environmental issues
  • outlines potential contributions of the religious community to the debate about global sustainability
  • offers a science-based assessment of issues such as carrying capacity, sustainability indicators, and the environmental impacts of consumer-based lifestyles
  • considers religious and theological perspectives on consumption and population from a variety of viewpoints including Roman Catholic, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Islamic
  • examines the ethical and policy dimensions of reorienting today's consumer society to one more focused on values, spiritual growth, and relationships.

Both the scientific and religious communities can make important contributions to understanding and responding to the impact of population growth and consumption patterns on environmental sustainability. This volume represents a significant step in establishing an ongoing dialogue between the communities, and provides a thought-provoking overview of the issues for scientists, theologians, and anyone concerned with the future of global sustainability.

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Cultivating Global Citizens
Population in the Rise of China
Susan Greenhalgh
Harvard University Press, 2010

Current accounts of China’s global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of China’s people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on China’s one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of China’s ascent.

Focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 2004–09, she argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state. By helping transform China’s rural masses into modern workers and citizens, by working to strengthen, techno-scientize, and legitimize the PRC regime, and by boosting China’s economic development and comprehensive national power, the governance of the population has been critically important to the rise of global China.

After decades of viewing population as a hindrance to modernization, China’s leaders are now equating it with human capital and redefining it as a positive factor in the nation’s transition to a knowledge-based economy. In encouraging “human development,” the regime is trying to induce people to become self-governing, self-enterprising persons who will advance their own health, education, and welfare for the benefit of the nation. From an object of coercive restriction by the state, population is being refigured as a field of self-cultivation by China’s people themselves.

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Economic Development, Population Policy, and Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea
Robert Repetto, Tae Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, and Peter J. Donaldson
Harvard University Press, 1981
This latest volume in the series Studies in Modernization of the Republic of Korea: 1945-1975 examines the relationship between economic developments and the government’s population policy and its implementation. Against the background of Korea’s traditional population pattern and the baby boom of the 1950s, the authors consider the changes wrought by migration, fertility, decline, and the government’s evolving program for family planning. The change from a traditional agricultural economy with a high and largely unregulated birth rate to a predominantly urbanized economy with a widespread and sophisticated family-planning program is one further feature in the rapid modernization of Korean government and lifestyle since that country’s emergence from colonialism.
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The Economization of Life
Michelle Murphy
Duke University Press, 2017
What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.
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Fatal Misconception
The Struggle to Control World Population
Matthew Connelly
Harvard University Press, 2010

Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the “quality of life.” This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized.

Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception and nationalist leaders who warned of “race suicide.” The ensuing struggle caused untold suffering for those caught in the middle—particularly women and children. It culminated in the horrors of sterilization camps in India and the one-child policy in China.

Matthew Connelly offers the first global history of a movement that changed how people regard their children and ultimately the face of humankind. It was the most ambitious social engineering project of the twentieth century, one that continues to alarm the global community. Though promoted as a way to lift people out of poverty—perhaps even to save the earth—family planning became a means to plan other people‘s families.

With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s withering critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.

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Fertility Change in Contemporary Japan
Robert W. Hodge and Naohiro Ogawa
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The authors examine the striking decline in Japan's birthrate in light of the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and socioeconomic development experienced by the nation since World War II.
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The Institutional Context of Population Change
Patterns of Fertility and Mortality across High-Income Nations
Fred C. Pampel
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Despite having similar economies and political systems, high-income nations show persistent diversity. In this pioneering work, Fred C. Pampel looks at fertility, suicide, and homicide rates in eighteen high-income nations to show how they are affected by institutional structures. European nations, for example, offer universal public benefits for men and women who are unable to work and have policies to ease the burdens of working mothers. The United States, in contrast, does not. This study demonstrates how public policy differences such as these affect childbearing among working women, moderate pressures for suicide and homicide among the young and old, and shape sex difference in suicide and homicide.

The Institutional Context of Population Change cuts across numerous political and sociological topics, including political sociology, stratification, sex and gender, and aging. It persuasively shows the importance of public policies for understanding the demographic consequences of population change and the importance of demographic change for understanding the consequences of public policies.
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Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru
Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms
Adam Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

By the end of the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its once-thriving silver industry, and it had barely begun to recover from massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. At the time, it was widely believed that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru,Adam Warrenpresents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this era.

The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions in the name of the Crown. Creole physicians in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. They asserted their new influence by treating smallpox and leprosy, by reforming medical education, and by introducing hygienic routines into local funeral rites, among other practices.

Later, during the early years of independence, government officials began to usurp the power of physicians and shifted control of medical care back to the church. Creole doctors, without the support of the empire, lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt.  As Warren’s study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru, and their influence can still be felt today.

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The Politics of Population in Brazil
Elite Ambivalence and Public Demand
By Peter McDonough and Amaury DeSouza
University of Texas Press, 1981

The population of Brazil increased tenfold, from 10 to over 100 million, between 1880 and 1980, nearly half of this increase occurring since the end of World War II. The Politics of Population in Brazil examines the attitudes toward population planning of Brazilian government officials and other elites—bishops, politicians, labor leaders, and business owners—in comparison with mass public opinion. The authors' findings that elites seriously underestimate the desire for family planning services, while the public views birth control as a basic issue, represent an important contribution on a timely issue.

A major reason for this disparity is that the elites tend to define the issue as a matter of national power and collective growth, and the public sees it as a bread-and-butter question affecting the daily lives of families. McDonough and DeSouza document not only the real gulf between elite and mass opinion but also the propensity of the elites to exaggerate this gap through their stereotyping of public opinion as conservative and disinterested in family planning.

Despite these differences, the authors demonstrate that population planning is less conflict ridden than many other controversies in Brazilian politics and probably more amenable to piecemeal bargaining than some earlier studies suggest. In part, this is because attitudes on the issue are not closely identified with opinions regarding left-versus-right disputes. In addition, for the public in general, religious sentiment affects attitudes toward family planning only indirectly. This separation, which reflects the historical lack of penetration of Brazilian society on the part of the church, further attenuates the issue's potential for galvanizing deep-seated antagonisms. As the authors note, this situation stands in contrast to the fierce debates that moral issues have generated in Spain and Ireland.

The study is noteworthy not only for its original approach—the incorporation of mass and elite data and the departure from the standard concerns with fertility determinants in population—but also for its sophisticated methodology and lucid presentation.

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Population Policies Reconsidered
Health, Empowerment, and Rights
Gita Sen
Harvard University Press, 1994
Population Policies Reconsidered brings together a rare combination of scholars, feminists, social activists, and policy-makers across many disciplines to critically reexamine the scientific foundation of contemporary population policies. This book explores population policy dilemmas based on the perspective of ethics, women’s empowerment and health, and human rights. The seventeen chapters are centered around the premise that the single-minded pursuit of demographic goals may not be the most effective means of achieving policy objectives—for such may lead to the abuse or violation of choice and human rights, especially of women. Rather, the book explores the alternative idea that population policies should focus on those ultimate aims of development that are linked to human reproduction—health, social empowerment, and human rights. If respectful of individuals, especially women, such policies are likely to promote better individual welfare and may well also result in desirable demographic outcomes.
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The Regulation of Sexuality
Experiences of Family Planning Workers
Carole Joffe
Temple University Press, 1987
"Joffe takes us from the most private aspects of sexuality into the arena of public policy and state regulation." --Carroll Smith-Rosenberg "The author convincingly argues that the Federal Government, the feminist movement and the New Right fail to adequately address the often wrenching conflicts faced daily by birth control and abortion workers. [These conflicts] have spurred many family planning workers to construct and implement a wholly unauthorized vision of family planning policy, one that melds pure ideology with the complicated truths of individuals' social and sexual lives.... [Joffe] makes a cogent and finely nuanced case for the wisdom-indeed, the necessity- of this vision." --Marian Sandmaier, New York Times Book Review "A psychosocial presentation at its best, the book probes and illuminates the workers' whole environment, documenting their need for status and engagement to offset meager pay and enervating routine and their need to balance sexual liberalism with concern for immature, vulnerable women. A valuable resource that clarifies human service programs as a whole." --Library Journal "A wonderfully alive and readable ethnographic study." --The Women's Review of Books
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Reproducing Inequities
Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti
Maternowska, M. Catherine
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Residents of Haiti-one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world-face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have sought to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning clinics, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) center in the heart of Cit Soleil. During its height of service in the 1980s and 1990s, the clinic boasted nineteen staff members, an array of modern contraceptives, an accessible location, and convenient hours-but very few clients.

Why did this initiative fail so spectacularly despite surveys finding that residents would like to have fewer children? Why don't poor women heed the message of family planning, when smaller families seem to be in their best interest? In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cit Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Medical anthropologists, she argues, have an important role to play in developing new action plans for better policy implementation. Ethnographic studies in desperate, dangerous locations provide essential data that can point the way to solutions for the dilemmas of contraception in poor communities worldwide.

 

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The Spirit of Soul Food
Race, Faith, and Food Justice
Christopher Carter
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to--and marker of--centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?

Christopher Carter's answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy. The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized.

Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food places today's Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice.

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The State and the Stork
The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
Derek S. Hoff
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From the colonial era to the present, the ever-shifting debate about America’s prodigious population growth has exerted a profound influence on the evolution of politics, public policy, and economic thinking in the United States. In a remarkable shift since the late 1960s, Americans of all political stripes have come to celebrate the economic virtues of population growth. As one of the only wealthy countries experiencing significant population growth in the twenty-first century, the United States now finds itself at a demographic crossroads, but policymakers seem unwilling or unable to address the myriad economic and environmental questions surrounding this growth.

From the founders’ fears that crowded cities would produce corruption, luxury, and vice to the zero population growth movement of the late 1960s to today’s widespread fears of an aging crisis as the Baby Boomers retire, the American population debate has always concerned much more than racial composition or resource exhaustion, the aspects of the debate usually emphasized by historians. In The State and the Stork, Derek Hoff draws on his extraordinary knowledge of the intersections between population and economic debates throughout American history to explain the many surprising ways that population anxieties have provoked unexpected policies and political developments—including the recent conservative revival. At once a fascinating history and a revelatory look at the deep origins of a crucial national conversation, The State and the Stork could not be timelier.
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The Wombs of Women
Race, Capital, Feminism
Françoise Vergès
Duke University Press, 2020
In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women—first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time—Françoise Vergès traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, Vergès demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.
 
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