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Concerns about global overpopulation spread rapidly in the 1940s and still persist today. The UN Resolution on Human Rights and Family Planning (1968) provided justifications for the argument that population growth endangered the realization of human rights and codified a right to contraception to halt this growth. Conversely, human rights were also invoked on the other side of this debate, with family planning regarded as an essential individual right independent of demographic considerations. Roman Birke explores how human rights became central to this debate, utilised by international actors including NGOs, the women's movement, international lawyers, and institutions such as the United Nations. He analyses how couples' intimate choices related to domestic and international policy, and how this varied across the world, through case studies of India, Ireland, the USA, and Yugoslavia. This is an essential contribution to the evolving literature on the role of reproductive politics in global political landscapes.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of figures and tables; 1. Introduction; 2. Overpopulation discourse and the post-1945 order; 3. Interventionist population policies of the 1950s; 4. Breakthrough of a human rights framework in the 1960s; 5. Interpretive struggles in the 1960s and 1970s; 6. Crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s; 7. Domestic interpretations of the human right to family planning; 8. Conflicts over reproductive rights since the 1980s; 9. Conclusion; References; Archives.
About the author
Roman Birke is a historian of human rights, humanitarianism and international norms at the University of Regensburg.
