Population Control, Feminism, and Reproductive Justice: Family Planning’s “Strange Bedmates” 30 Years after Cairo

Leigh G. Senderowicz, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Rishita Nandagiri

Although widely credited with ending population control and ushering in a new era of reproductive rights and gender equity, the ICPD Program of Action included some important compromises. We critically examine how these compromises have allowed population control (and its racialized/gendered/colonial logics) to continue to flourish within contemporary global reproductive health. We show how neo-Malthusian concerns still motivate much family planning programming, though this is now shrouded in the coopted feminist rhetoric of women’s health/empowerment. We argue that, rather than the binary conception of pro/anti contraception that came out of the ICPD, there are multiple ideological positions within the contested sphere of family planning, including: 1) concern over fertility/population dynamics; 2) opposition to biomedical contraception/abortion; and 3) concern for reproductive autonomy and justice. We tease out the intersecting/diverging tenets of these ideologies and conclude with a call for a new consensus for global family planning based solely on reproductive justice.