What’s so troubling about ‘voluntary’ family planning anyway? A feminist perspective

Abstract

Voluntary family planning is a key mainstay of demographic work and population policies. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) signalled a decisive shift away from fertility reduction and target-setting to an emphasis on voluntary family planning as intrinsic to reproductive health and women’s empowerment. Yet, criticisms of voluntary family planning programmes persist, interrogating how ‘voluntariness’ is understood and wielded or questioning the instrumentalization of women’s fertilities in the service of economic and developmental goals. In this paper, I reflect on these debates with the aim of troubling the notion of voluntary family planning as an unambiguous good that enables equitable empowerment and development for all. Drawing on literature from cognate disciplines, I highlight how voluntariness is linked to social and structural conditions, and I challenge the instrumentalization of voluntary family planning as a ‘common agenda’ to solve ‘development’ problems. Engaging with this work can contribute to key concepts (e.g. ‘voluntary’) and measurements (e.g. autonomy), strengthening the collective commitment to achieving the ICPD and contributing to reproductive empowerment and autonomy. Through this intervention, I aim to help demographers see why some critics call for a reconsideration of voluntary family planning and encourage a decoupling of interventions from fertility reduction aims, instead centring human rights, autonomy, and reproductive empowerment.

Keywords:

• voluntary family planning
• population policy
• feminist demography
• reproduction
• ICPD

Notes

1 Rishita Nandagiri is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Please direct all correspondence to Rishita Nandagiri, Department of Methodology, Houghton Street, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; or by Email: [email protected] or Twitter https://twitter.com/rishie_

2 Many thanks to Professor Wendy Sigle and the participants of the virtual Population Studies workshop for contributors to this issue, held in September 2020, for their thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their critical commentary and impassioned defence of the discipline—it was a real learning curve, and I am grateful for their engagement. I am immensely grateful to Professor Wendy Sigle, Professor Ernestina Coast, Dr Tiziana Leone, Dr Flora Cornish, Dr Jenny Chanfreau, Dr Laura Sochas, Joe Strong, and Dr Leigh Senderowicz for the invigorating conversations that helped me develop my arguments and clarify my position.

3 Funding: My work on this paper was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/V006282/1).