"Deconstructing the population control movement in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s: A three-sphere approach"

Serdar Furtuna, Ecole des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

The 1960s was the heyday of the global population control movement and by 1969, twenty Third World countries, representing half the world's population, introduced antinatalist policies almost simultaneously. Scholars studying the changing population policies of this era unanimously agree that population control movements in these countries were a by-product of the global hegemonic configuration of the post-World War II world. Yet, this study offers a multidimensional three-sphere approach that also gives agency to national interests and individual claims. In the national sphere, the conditionalities of these twenty countries that forced them to switch to antinatalist policies were analyzed and categorized based on population literature of each country. Furthermore, the individual claims of women and the family on the birth control were elaborated in detail through the Turkish case. The claim of the study is that population control was not a unilateral hegemonic project, but an implicit and fragile intersection of these three spheres - global, national and individual -, whose main interest was to improve their "quality" through limiting the population. In this sense, this study is the story of the ideology of population control that became an instrument for improving the quality of life in the 1950s and 1960s.

Keywords: Population Policies, Historical Demography, Fertility, Family Planning and Contraception

See extended abstract.