Demography and Health in the Context of Climate Change

The Sahel is subject to uniquely rapid population growth—putting pressure on already scarce resources. The challenge to meet the basic needs of a rapidly growing population is compounded by the impacts of climate change. Despite the recent gains in child survival in the Sahel, three contextual factors combine to suggest that mortality rates could rise—especially among the most vulnerable populations, that is, infants and the elderly. These factors are: an ongoing protracted nutrition crisis, rapid population growth, and impacts of climate change on food production. Evidence-based population policies and large-scale investment in family planning and girls’ secondary education have the potential to curb current demographic trends, making it easier for the region to adapt to climate change and achieve long-term food security.

Development and Validation of a Discrete Event Simulation Model to Evaluate the Cardiovascular Impact of Population Policies for Obesity

Introduction Our aim was to describe the development and validation of an obesity model representing the cardiovascular risks associated with different body mass index (BMI) categories, through simulation, designed to evaluate the epidemiological and economic impact of population policies for obesity. Methods A discrete event simulation model was built in R considering the risk of cardiovascular events (heart failure, stroke, coronary heart disease, and diabetes) associated with BMI categories in the Spanish population. The main parameters included in the model were estimated from Spanish hospital discharge records and the Spanish Health Survey and allowed both first-order and second-order (probabilistic sensitivity analysis) uncertainty to be programmed into the model. The simulation yielded the incidence and prevalence of cardiovascular events as validation outputs. To illustrate the capacity of the model, we estimated the reduction in cardiovascular events and cost-utility (incremental cost/incremental quality-adjusted life-years [QALYs]) of a hypothetical intervention that fully eliminated the cardiovascular risks associated with obesity and overweight. Results The Validation Status of Health-Economic decision models (AdViSHE) tool was applied. Internal validation plots showed adequate goodness of fit for the Spanish population. External validation was achieved by comparing the simulated and real incidence by age group for stroke, acute myocardial infarction, and heart failure. The intervention reduced the population hazard ratios of stroke, acute myocardial infarction, and heart failure to 0.81, 0.74, and 0.78, respectively, and added 0.74 QALYs to the whole population. Conclusions This obesity simulation model evidenced good properties for estimating the long-term epidemiological and economic impact of policies to tackle obesity in Spain. The conceptual model could be implemented for other counties using country-specific input data.

Women’s education and desire for additional children in Vietnam: regional differences and the role of son preference

This paper investigates the relationship between women’s education and desire for additional children across the six economic regions of Vietnam. The study employed data from the nationally representative Vietnam Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2014. Probit regression results showed that for women with one child, higher levels of education were associated with higher fertility desire in two out of six regions. Similar results were found for women with two or more children. Children’s sex composition played a role in the desire for additional children, reflecting both son preference and mixed-gender preference. In Vietnam overall, among women with at least one boy, those with lower levels of education were more likely not to want another child. The results, however, differed by region. The findings suggest that the social and economic context of each region, particularly sex ratio at birth and total fertility rate, should be taken into account when designing population policies in Vietnam.

Qualified to be deviant: stigma-management strategies among Chinese leftover women

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

The population control bill, 2021: exploring newer perspectives

As we observe the World Population Day on 11th July, the current population stands at roughly 7.9 billion in 2021, with India bagging the second place at 1.39 billion. The net growth rate stands at 1.1% or 83 million per year and the projected world population by 2050 is estimated to be 9.7 billion. These figures are alarming to us-the millennials, who grew up writing ominous essays on ‘population explosion’ at school. Governments across the world, historically Romania to more recently China, have adopted population policies to control the rate of population growth to cater to their advantage-either economically or politically. Some of them directly against reproductive rights- to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to be able to do so without discrimination, coercion and violence.

Power Relations in Reproductive Decisions Under the Transforming Family Planning Policy in China

China’s family planning policy has had a profound influence on individuals and families for the past 30 years. The universal two-child policy implemented in 2016 is its most relaxed form. The consequences of the policy transitions are worthwhile to explore . By interviewing 26 middle class mothers who gave birth to a second child during the policy transformation, we consider women’s accounts of their reproductive decisions-making processes. We found that the participants exerted strong agency in their reproductive decisions, but meanwhile they were reproducers and embodiments of traditional culture, population policies and patriarchal power. They internalised various modes of power that dictate how women should regulate their bodies, reflecting the mechanisms of self-governance. Self-governance functions as a subtle technique of conflict avoidance through which explicit conflicts are dissolved and transformed into intrapersonal self-adjustment and personal struggle. Our research broadens the conceptualisation of self-governance by incorporating relational dynamics using evidence from China.

Eugenic Concerns, Population Policies and Puericulture in Interwar Greece

The scientific origins and the development of eugenic and racial theoriesformulated by physicians, jurists and intellectuals since the early twentieth century have only recently attracted scholarly attention. However, the dissemination of eugenic measures regarding the social policy that Greek interwar governments implemented to protect the health of mothers and children still remains an underresearched topic. Our contribution presents the main points of the discussion about the relation of eugenics and puericulture and traces its development among paediatricians in the 1920s and 1930s. It further looks into the stakes, the ambivalent attitude and the eugenic proposals of both liberal and authoritarian governments concerning the protection of childhood and motherhood as well as into their respective demographic policies during the interwar period.

‘The Great Replacement’:

Starting point of this paper is a reconstruction of the key argumentation patterns the extreme right in the German-speaking countries use for supporting their reproduction and population policies. It will then continue with an analysis of relevant narratives, taking the far-right group of ‘Identitarians’ as an example, in particular their campagin Stoppt den Großen Austausch (‘Stop the Great Replacement’), which was initiated in 2014 by their Austrian chapter (IBÖ). Within the framework of a critical discourse analysis, I will investigate how the Identitarians have updated the key argumentation patterns of far-right reproduction and population policies, although basically they only modernized the language of decades-old ideas, and which role gender-specific aspects have played in this context.