Results by title
11 books match the query 'Family planning'
Broadcasting Birth Control
Mass Media and Family PlanningParry, Manon
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Mass media, Manon Parry contends, was critical to the birth control movement’s attempts to build support and later to publicize the idea of fertility control and the availability of contraceptive services in the United States and around the world. Though these public efforts in advertising and education were undertaken initially by leading advocates, including Margaret Sanger, increasingly a growing class of public communications experts took on the role, mimicking the efforts of commercial advertisers to promote health and contraception in short plays, cartoons, films, and soap operas. In this way, they made a private subject—fertility control—appropriate for public discussion.
Parry examines these trends to shed light on the contested nature of the motivations of birth control advocates. Acknowledging that supporters of contraception were not always motivated by the best interests of individual women, Parry concludes that family planning advocates were nonetheless convinced of women’s desire for contraception and highly aware of the ethical issues involved in the use of the media to inform and persuade.
Conceiving Cuba
Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet EraAndaya, Elise
Rutgers University Press, 2014
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.
Humanae Vitae, 50 Years Later
Embracing God's Vision for Marriage, Love, and Life; A CompendiumPreface by Most. Rev. Charles J. Chaput, OFM, Cap.
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
Integrating Family Planning Training into Medical Education
A Case Study of St. Paul's Hospital Millennium Medical CollegeLia T. Gebremedhin
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
The innovative approach, founded on the values of sustainable capacity building through academic partnership and centered on improving access to dignified women’s reproductive health care through effective pre-service training, has the potential for expansion to other countries with high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. In this case study, we spell out the best practices, which we hope will inspire academic medical centers in the Global South, global health departments/centers internationally, and the reproductive health community at large.
Narrating Infertility in Spain
Catherine Bourland Ross
Bucknell University Press, 2026
The drop in Spanish birth rates in 1998 to their lowest level of 1.1 births per woman was accompanied by a boom in publishing about motherhood. New narrative forms, ranging from blogs to diaries to comics, expressed women’s experiences, including ambivalence about motherhood in the face of societal pressures. Narrating Infertility in Spain, the first study of infertility in post-2008 female-authored texts, analyzes discussions of adoption, assisted reproduction, egg and sperm donation, and the decision not to have children due to economic or social instability. By examining the work of writers and vocal activists Silvia Nanclares, Raquel Sánchez-Silva, Samanta Villar, Laura Freixas, and Diana López Varela, Ross situates infertility in Spain within the cultural context of the Great Recession, while considering it as a business, a crisis, a stigma, and a class issue, and offering broader understandings of contemporary fertility challenges in Spain and beyond.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Planning Families in Nepal
Global and Local Projects of ReproductionBrunson, Jan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Choice in Twentieth-Century Arizona
Mary S. Melcher
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Early twentieth-century Arizona was a life-threatening place for new and expectant mothers. Towns were small and very far apart, and the weather and harsh landscape often delayed midwives. It was not uncommon for a woman to give birth without medical care and with the aid of only family members. By the 1920s, Arizona was at the top of the list for the highest number of infant deaths.
Mary Melcher’s Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Choice in Twentieth-Century Arizona provides a deep and diverse history of the dramatic changes in childbirth, birth control, infant mortality, and abortion over the course of the last century. Using oral histories, memoirs, newspaper accounts, government documents, letters, photos, and biographical collections, this fine-grained study of women’s reproductive health places the voices of real women at the forefront of the narrative, providing a personal view into some of the most intense experiences of their lives.
Tackling difficult issues such as disparities in reproductive health care based on race and class, abortion, and birth control, this book seeks to change the way the world looks at women’s health. An essential read for both historians and public health officials, this book reveals that many of the choices and challenges that women once faced remain even today.
The Economization of Life
M. Murphy
Duke University Press, 2017
The Gospel of Family Planning
An Intimate Global HistoryNicole C. Bourbonnais
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In the twentieth century, the idea that people should consciously plan (and limit) the size of their families became a global cause. Historical accounts of the global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and government programs. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, historian Nicole C. Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers—doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers—who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role in preaching contraception around the world.
Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, Bourbonnais visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, ground-level workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programs, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them. Throughout the book, Bourbonnais invites readers to consider how the intertwined histories of missionary work, humanitarianism, feminism, decolonization, and international development shaped intimate interventions into people’s reproductive lives around the world.
Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture
Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal BiopoliticsMichele Rivkin-Fish
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
Honorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2025
Honorable Mention, Women’s Forum Book Prize, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, 2024
As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. With market reforms, Russians enjoyed new access to Western contraceptives and new pressures to postpone childbearing until economically self-sufficient. But habits of family planning did not emerge automatically—they required extensive physician retraining, public education, and cultural transformation. In Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture, author Michele Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion. Rather than emphasizing individual rights, they explained family planning’s benefits to the nation—its potential to strengthen families and prevent the secondary sterility that resulted when women underwent repeat, poor-quality abortions. Still, fierce debates about abortion and contraceptives erupted as declining fertility was framed as threatening Russia’s demographic sovereignty.
Although Russian family planners embraced a culturally meaningful liberalism that would rationalize public policy and reenchant relations, nationalist opponents cast family planning as suspicious for its association with the individualistic, “child-free” West. This book tells the story of how Russian family planners developed culturally salient frameworks to promote the acceptability of contraceptives and help end routine abortion. It also documents how nationalist campaigns for higher fertility denounced family planning and ultimately dismantled its institutions. By tracing these processes, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture demonstrates the central importance of reproductive politics in the struggle for liberalizing social change that preceded Russia’s 2022 descent into war, repression, and global marginalization.
Wanting Children
Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s PopulationLeonard M. Lopoo
University of Chicago Press, 2026
On the eugenic origins of US reproductive laws—and the surprising policy changes needed to remedy it.
The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.
In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.
Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. Wanting Children posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.