Conclusion

Chapter 11 concludes the book and reflects on the lessons that can be learned from a holistic overview of the past three hundred years of governments’ attempts to manipulate the fertility of their populations. Reiterating the fundamentally discursive nature of the meaning of birth, fertility, and population growth to our societies allows for reflective insight into the nature of state attempts to manipulate the decision by millions of individuals about whether to reproduce. The global comparative perspective in both time and space, the identification and typologization of the five main discursive frames, and the rooting of the analysis in the discursive terrain allow the major questions of who, what, when, where, and why regarding government efforts to control the reproductive powers of the population and the creation of a sexual duty to the state to be answered.

Challenging Hegemony, Competing for the Truth

Chapter 6 focuses on the rebirth of the Malthusian concept of overpopulation and the translation of fears over hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction to the problem of population. Moreover, delving into how alternative theories arose to challenge the dominant modernization discourse championed by national security and development agencies of Western states, this chapter explores the subjugated discourses espoused by actors including the nascent environmental movement, the Soviet Union, the Vatican, and the Black Panthers. This chapter shows how it is the subjective threat perception, married to the dominant discursive frame the actor adopts, that results in the creation of natalist attitudes and policy. Significantly, the wishes of individuals themselves are systematically ignored when actors come to narrate the meaning of fertility for the collective, which due to the very conceptualization of the problem at hand most often results in the failure of policy to have the desired effects.

How I Learned to Love the Bomb

Chapter 5 explores Europe countries’ rapid abandonment of efforts to boost their birth rates and the dramatic shift of natalist attention to the global South. Uncovering the origins of a new discourse on population, this chapter demonstrates how the concept of development was melded with the newly created problem of high fertility in the postcolonial world. It looks at the role of scientists, doctors, academics, and military leaders in driving a massive expansion of Western development efforts in the area of reproduction and the creation of modern birth control techniques. In addition, this chapter highlights how an extremely broad range of Western-based, organizations from the World Bank to the CIA and Planned Parenthood, became involved in encouraging Third World governments to lower the fertility of their populations.

Babies Hurt Development, Except When We’re Modern (Developing World 1980–Present)

Chapter 10 traces the dramatic and sustained burst in anti-natalist activity within the developing world over the last forty years. Between 1976 and 2011 the number of least-developed states that expressed a need to reduce the fertility of their citizens leapt from 31 to 92 percent. This chapter explores the many mechanisms the population giants of the developing world have used to try to control the procreative practices of their citizens and craft policies believed to best address the common problems of underdevelopment, poverty, and state weakness. Moreover, counterfactual cases, such as the Palestinians, are explored to highlight the discursive, nonobjective nature of state reactions to demographic realities. This chapter adds to the debate concerning the merits and boundaries of efforts to shape the reproductive outcomes of millions of individuals living in the global South.

To Breed or Not to Breed, That Is the Question (Europe 1776–1870)

Chapter 3 examines the rise of the natalist discourses that proliferated from 1776 to 1870. The works and disciples of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Friederich Engels are analyzed to illuminate the birth of new narratives on natality and revolutionary ideas on the meaning of population growth to the body politic. In addition, the birth of demography as a science is discussed. The modern tools of statistics, the census, and secular recordkeeping of population data were pioneered during this era. Discourse was complemented by policy during this period by the new truths on population, which became embedded in the minds of government officials and policymakers. The disconnect between macro conceptualizations of the population and the real behaviors of individuals is examined to begin the process of uncovering the truth about the consistent failure of policy across states.

Cannon Fodder for the Crown (Europe 1600–1776)

Chapter 2 explores the origins of natalist thought, tracing thinking on fertility to the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which modern forms of power and knowledge rose in tandem. Mercantilist attempts to grow the population for the greater glory of the monarch are documented, as is the discourse on fertility, which motivated and legitimized government behavior. In addition, the transnational nature of natalism is analyzed. Thinkers such as Englishman John Graunt and the French scientist Adolphe Quetelet cross-pollinated intellectually, and statesmen as diverse as Frederick the Great and Benjamin Franklin drew from the same narratives to understand the size and growth of the population and its significance for the state.

Babies Will Save Us

Chapter 9 examines the transnationalization of the neo-mercantilist discourse among developed world states. Tracing its origins to developments in France and the Soviet Union, this chapter explores how current government attitudes across the developed world came to be, as over two-thirds of all developed world states are now trying to grow their populations through manipulating fertility. This is the first major deconstruction of modern attitudes on population growth among developed world states that fully accounts for the rise and spread of such dramatically isomorphic policies across such dissimilar states while simultaneously accounting for the generalized failure of such policies to result in the desired objective. This chapter updates the natalist history of the developed world and explains how such a diverse array of governments, policymakers, academics, and the general public have come to seek the salvation of their nations in the wombs of their people.

Sex and the State

Chapter 1 begins by laying out the fundamental question of the book: What accounts for the ongoing choices of world leaders at multiple levels of governance to spend vast sums of money and manpower to instill a sexual duty to the state and policies designed to manipulate fertility that have a relatively robust record of failure? It explains government motivation as rooted in a narrative crafted to give meaning to fertility and in the discursive linkages drawn between fertility and the major threats a country perceives itself to face that determine government action. Moreover, this chapter outlines an explanation of why natalist policy typically fails. This book argues that the dissonance between macro understandings of fertility at the state level and micro understandings of fertility as practiced by individuals lies at the heart of the failure of policy.

Socialism in the Bedroom

Chapter 8 seeks to explain the evolution of postwar natalist thought in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. While its approach to the developing world came to mirror many aspects of the Western approach to population politics in the Third World, the Soviet Union began to pioneer a new understanding of fertility for developed world populations and gave birth to a new neo-mercantilist discourse on fertility. Perceiving threats stemming from an aging population, a declining labor force, growing obligations to elderly populations, and ethnic others, notably Islamic peoples, the Soviets began to reintegrate pro-natalist policies into the core of state policy. Tracing how this new discourse spread from its home in academic journals to state policy, this chapter demonstrates how government came to reinhabit the wombs of the people by positing a direct relationship between threats to the health of the state and the fertility of the people.

Enemy at the Gates

Chapter 7 takes an in-depth look at the evolution of population politics within the developing world from 1800 to 1980, with a special focus on India and China. An exploration of the role of British influence on early Indian demographic thinking in tandem with the role of indigenous Indian thinkers, this chapter broadens the lessons developed in chapters 2 through 6 and applies them to the newly formed states of the postcolonial world. Similarly, the chapter discusses the origins and evolution of Chinese attitudes toward population control. Exploring the distinct similarities of China’s One-Child policy to other population control efforts of its time, this chapter demystifies China’s efforts, as they stand in ready comparison in style if not in intensity with other efforts occurring throughout the developing world.