From population control to 'reproductive rights': Ideological influences in population policy

This paper is a review of the interdisciplinary literature examining ideological influences which have helped to shape population control policy in recent decades. A powerful critique of what has become a top-down, ethnocentric approach towards a narrowly focused policy has emerged both from scholars within the Third World itself and from those in the more developed regions. Concerns with issues such as outside intervention in national sovereignty, ethical aspects associated with the implementation of fertility control programmes, the exclusion of Third World scholars from research programmes within their own countries, and the unwillingness of programmes to consider complex social and cultural dimensions of high fertility, are among those which this literature has raised. The role of professional demographers, as part of the population establishment network within the USA, in providing respectable justification for questionable policy intervention, is also examined.