Family Planning

Family planning is a term that was created in the mid-twentieth century to refer to the ability to control reproduction through access to contraception, abortion, sterilization, and information and education. Reproductive control allows a woman to determine when and whether she will have children. A woman's ability to control the birth and spacing of her children has a direct impact on her educational, economic, and social opportunities, and a woman's enjoyment of heterosexual activity can be affected by the fear of becoming pregnant because she lacks information about and access to contraception and abortion.

HISTORY OF FAMILY PLANNING

Women have found ways to control their reproduction since the earliest days of recorded history. However, those methods were not always safe or effective. With industrialization, urbanization, and the advent of new reproductive technologies, there was a shift away from women's ability as individuals to control their reproductive lives. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the regulation of contraception and abortion began in earnest in the United States. In 1873 Congress passed the Act of the Suppression of Trade In, and Circulation Of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use (Comstock Law), which was named for the U.S. postal agent Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), who lobbied for the bill's passage. The law criminalized, among other things, the distribution through the U.S. Mail of information and materials related to contraception and abortion. By 1900 every state had criminalized abortion in most circumstances.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, social activists such as Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) and some members of the medical profession initiated a campaign for legalized contraception. By the mid-1930s contraception was more widely available in the United States, whereas abortion remained illegal until the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973. Sanger's organization, the American Birth Control League (formed in 1921), joined with other advocacy groups to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

Since their decriminalization the availability and acceptance of contraception, abortion, and information about sexuality and reproduction (sex education) have fluctuated with the influence of political and religious and/or moral leaders, the attitude of the medical profession, and advances in and the availability of technologies. One perspective on the role of family planning is that it provides information and technology to women so that they can control the number of children they will have (if any) and when they will have them. However, this ideal often is not met in reality. Women may have to contend with limitations on their reproductive rights on a micro level. They may be forced by a heterosexual spouse or other family members to prevent births (sterilization, contraception, abortion) or to give birth to a large number of offspring. With an unequal power differential in many families and marriages, women may be forced to create a family on the basis of the needs and desires of others.

On the macro level nations and international non-governmental agencies are actively involved in regulating the availability of contraception, abortion, and sex education in countries around the world. These macro-level decisions often are based on economics, racism, military strategy, or the opinions of religious leaders. Typically, the nations with the largest financial input into international organizations, such as the United States, have the greatest voice in whether such groups advocate pronatalist or antinatalist policies.

ANTINATALISM AND PRONATALISM

Antinatalism is the discouragement of population growth (limiting childbirth) through policy and law. It often appears in nations where limited resources or geographic space requires limitations on population growth. Often antinatalism comes in the form of forced utilization of contraception, sterilization, and legalized abortion. Coercion to limit childbirth may take the form of legal acts or economic incentives. In China, for example, a one-child policy was introduced in the 1970s in response to fears of overpopulation in relation to that nation's limited resources. Although a couple could have more than one child, additional offspring meant an increased economic burden for a family through levies and fines. In China antinatalism combined with a cultural preference for male offspring led to a high rate of selective abortion and female infanticide.

Pronatalism refers to laws and policies that encourage population growth. It often becomes the policy in nations that have experienced a significant population decline (for example, after a war or a natural disaster) or when a government attempts to expand the labor force. Criminalization of contraception and abortion and limited access to sterilization are indicators of a pronatalist policy. Economic incentives such as tax breaks and monetary awards may be utilized to encourage marriage and large families. For example, after World War II, with the deaths of millions of its citizens in combat and on the home front, the government of the Soviet Union encouraged women to have large families, giving them medals and rewarding them monetarily for compliance. In a more recent example, after the war in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, Serbian women were encouraged, in a campaign steeped in nationalism, to have children to replace the soldiers lost in war.

Not all nations have a specific, overtly stated policy on population growth. However within nations different economic classes or ethnic and/or racial groups may be encouraged to or discouraged from reproducing in large numbers through specific, targeted laws or policies.

In each of these scenarios the concept of reproductive choice or reproductive justice is circumvented to some degree by national law and policy. Reproductive decisions are made by someone other than the woman who is or may become pregnant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon, Linda. 2002. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. 3rd edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hartmann, Betsy. 1995. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Boston: South End Press.

Petchesky, Rosalind P. 1990. Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Petchesky, Rosalind P. 2000. Reproductive and Sexual Rights: Charting the Course of Transnational Women's NGOs. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Reagan, Leslie. 1997. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973. Berkeley: University of California Press.

World Health Organization. 2005. Selected Practice Recommendations for Contraceptive Use. 2nd edition. Geneva: Reproductive Health and Research, Family and Community Health, World Health Organization. Available from http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/rhr%5F02%5F7/spr.pdf.

                                           Julie L. Thomas