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Introduction: Controlling Women, Controlling Reproduction

In 1984, in the revised (New) Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective argued that reproduction and its control were central to women's lives as social citizens. The authors wrote, "Unless we can decide whether and when to have children, it is difficult for us to control our lives or participate fully in society" (p. 291). Ten years later, the Beijing Declaration at the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women similarly argued that "the explicit recognition and reaffirmation of the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment" (UN Women 1995). In this book, we examine the power of reproduction and the importance of the struggle to control it.

Like other feminists over the past many decades and throughout the world, we see reproduction as central to how women and gender are constructed and to the role of women in social life. In societies across the world, the continuing struggles over control of reproduction have involved many people, organizations, and institutions: churches and mosques, schools, health institutions, businesses, government agencies, families, NGOs, as well as individual women themselves. We argue that early feminists were right in seeing reproduction as central to women's place in their societies. But while we recognize the importance of reproduction to individual women, in this book we go beyond the level of individuals and focus on ways that broader social forces and institutions have been involved in reproduction and its control. At the same time, we examine how these larger social processes are linked to and influence the most intimate and individual levels of social life. We keep in mind that the direction of influence goes in both directions: reproduction is both shaped by and shapes all social institutions.

If we accept the premise that reproduction is central to women's lives and to their ability to live as engaged social citizens, we can then widen our lens and change its focus and ask: if you control the reproduction of a population or a group of people, what is it you control? We argue that reproduction is so powerful and so intertwined with other social processes and institutions that control of reproduction means control of women, who sit at the center of nearly all reproductive processes. But the importance of reproduction and its control means that these processes also shape most corners of social, economic, and political life, thus the social world well beyond reproduction itself. As another feminist scholar working in this field has argued: "How societies handle human reproduction . shapes hierarchy and subordination on the basis of class, gender, age, race, and a host of other social orderings, and is a core concern of the social policies of states" (Sen 1994: 5).

The stakes are high for women, families, communities, and nations in this process; in her investigation of reproductive control in Romania, Gail Kligman wrote, "In view of the multiple interests and values attached to reproduction it is understandable that . individual, familial, and political interests in reproduction differ so dramatically . [Reproductive] issues constitute a focus for contestation within societies as well as between them" (1998: 5). Further, because it is women who are most involved in all aspects of reproduction, the imperative of reproductive control means that all aspects of women's lives are under scrutiny, regulation, and control as well. Early American feminists who argued that "the personal is political" were right to point to how individual lives are also entwined with processes at the levels of family, community, nation, and globe.

At the center of control of reproduction - and of our own inquiry and analysis - is the modern state (Foucault 1978, 1991; Gal and Kligman 2000), long a principal player in reproductive politics and outcomes. While there are many forces that influence reproduction in any society, including family and religion - and we address those forces too - most of those forces find their way into, through, or out of state practices and regulations. The state has a vital interest in reproduction for many reasons: reproduction is often linked to economic structures, policies, and goals; how the state envisions the nation and who is and is not included in that vision usually revolves around reproduction; and the way that state control of population - size, growth, and composition - is often deemed the purview of the modern state and acted on through policies, regulations (or their absence) that directly or indirectly affect reproduction. In our focus on state involvement, we see the state not as a monolith or universal across time and place, but, rather, as a set of processes that are "evolving, dialectic, and dynamic" (Waylen 1998: 7), intertwined with the surrounding society; state practices and outcomes do not arise independently but are integrally connected to and arise from the norms, values, practices, and ideologies of the social institutions and communities among which the state resides.

Throughout this volume, we trace and analyze how states are involved in processes shaping reproduction and show how states influence gender, reproduction, and their connections both directly and indirectly. State involvement in reproduction has changed in recent decades; with the spread of neoliberal capitalism, we see a decline in direct state involvement in this and many other aspects of social life. Nevertheless, even as the state's role in society has undergone change, efforts to control reproduction have not disappeared, but have taken on new, or related, forms (Foucault 1978, 1991; Harvey 2005; Scott 1999).

We draw examples from across the globe and, in doing so, highlight how "reproductive governance," as it is sometimes called (Morgan and Roberts 2012), comes in many shapes and forms. Reproductive control has both a structural and an ideological aspect to it, and we examine how those pieces are related and supported. We address coercive efforts to control population (because the state believes fertility is too low or too high, we discuss examples of both), but also the less coercive means (and programs) that control population/fertility, which have been much more common in recent decades. These latter programs include those that run through the state, such as economic interventions (e.g., tax breaks for those who have kids) and programs or the lack of them (maternity leave, child care). But with the decline in states' power under neoliberal capitalism, nonstate forces, such as NGOs, corporations, and other private sector institutions, have become especially important.

We do not see the state as always opposite to or antagonistic toward women. But at the same time, it is nearly always women who are most affected by reproductive governance policies, practices, and outcomes. While men are also involved in reproduction, and reproductive politics affect men as well - especially through how reproduction is connected to the ways masculinity is constructed - it is the physicality of reproduction that is specific to women's place in reproductive politics; it is women who get pregnant or do not, who carry babies to term, who bear children. It has nearly always been women and their bodies that have been targeted in family planning and fertility control programs, and we will make that case through our examples. We will be exploring the reasons why women have been the focus not only for some of the obvious physiological reasons but also because they are often seen as the keepers of culture; their role in reproduction is thus explicitly connected to the goals of state and nation. "Women are often the ones who are given the social role of intergenerational transmitters of cultural traditions, customs, songs, cuisine and, of course, the mother tongue (sic!)" (Yuval-Davis 1993: 627; emphasis in original). The patriarchal1 organization and ideology that structure societies are also key: although in most societies men have power that women do not, especially in the public spheres, there is also power in reproduction; thus, controlling that reproductive power is important in maintaining gender hierarchy. Within a neoliberal framework, with its focus on individuals (and the importance of individuals making good choices), women continue to be the targets of population and reproductive governance today. Even some of the more "feminist" turns in population control (e.g. the Cairo [1994] and Beijing [1995] UN Conferences on Population and Women, respectively) use this neoliberal framework - promoting women's "empowerment" (a focus on individual efforts) rather than efforts to dismantle the larger systems of inequality.

Throughout the book, we will be applying a "sociological imagination" (Mills 2000 [1959]): connecting individuals and larger social processes and institutions. Thus, while the state or the global economy might be involved in state policies, they also influence the daily lives of individuals, women, and families. We will also be drawing on Foucault's (1978, 1991, 2004) arguments about population, particularly issues of biopolitics and governmentality. "Biopolitics allows for conceiving power as not merely top down but as diffuse, such as when individuals become subject to norms of behavior and may internalize those norms yet...