Population policy and contraceptive choice

Abstract

The book is a gust of fresh wind within the crowd of demographic literature. The authors successfully took a rather niche topic of contraceptive use and expanded the scope to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach by fusing the politics of family planning to the choice of contraceptives, at the level of a continent. The book comes at a crucial moment when, perhaps for the first time since 1965 Belgrade conference, the world is contemplating the necessity for population control.1 It is this style of historical narrative to gaze into the legacy of Asian family-planning programmes that makes this book such a captivating read. Contrary to the popular discourse, population numbers have not stopped being a challenge to the policy-makers. Even as the two giants, India and China, approach replacement level and much of the former USSR is experiencing a sustained negative growth, the world population continues to grow at an alarming rate.2 With improving standards of living and per-capita resource utilization in South and East Asian countries rising to match the Western standards, one would be terrified to anticipate the consequences of the ecological strain on the planet to be brought about by humankind.3 More worrying, however, is the spatial disparity in the projected growth rate. Even for all the globalized activities, our political order remains territorially entrenched, and differential population growth is already showing symptoms of the calamities that it is about to bring along. If the present trend continues, fracture zones between highand low-population countries are looking at a bleak future of refugee crises, cultural conflicts, and armed struggles.4 Being the poster child for planned fertility transition, discussions on population policy have traditionally been centred on Asian countries and, while those countries are by and large on the verge of approaching replacement level, much of Africa is staring down the barrel of an impending population explosion.5 Couple this with the fact that, from the development of the Bucharest conference to the cafeteria approach of the Cairo conference and beyond, international rationales of contraceptive choice are in a constant flux; the formulation of effective family-planning programmes in African countries would require all the past experiences it can get.6 A carefully organized understanding between a state’s activity and couples’ choice as undertaken in this work can provide significant insights into a nascent population programme. Right from the outset, with the opening phrase “Ever since antiquity till the recent times,” the authors make their intention clear to accord history a centre stage in their analysis. Indeed, the first section of the first chapter presents a nostalgic hindsight into