The politics of fertility control is all about power and control exerted by various stakeholders over individual lives and limited resources. It is about the role of the state in regulating individual behaviour. Its starts with the specification of the rationale for government involvement in policies to alter human behaviour related to reproduction and sexuality. These policies also seek to justify the means adopted by the government to influence fertility behaviour. Anrudh Jain starts of with some hard facts.
The politics is about the influence of academics and intellectuals on fertility-reduction policies and also about the role of international donors, deeply influenced themselves as they are by the political climate in their respective countries, in designing policies to reduce fertility in developing countries. Bureaucrats, conditioned by governments and donor agencies, play their own role at the implementation level. The politics of fertility control is about the control one class or ethnic group exerts over another, and about the gender relations within and beyond the household (p 1).
The process of population policymaking is topdown. The population policies in developing countries are often designed to reduce the high rate of population growth. This is primarily guided by the national interest of economic development, and is influenced by the Western thinking of demographic and economic modelling (p 2).
The tendency to equate population policy with family planning programmes, both semantic and real, has resulted from three factors. Firstly, it was an interpretation of population policy to mean solely a fertility-reduction policy. Secondly, it was the use of the label "family planning programmes" to encompass all means of inducing fertility decline, ranging from voluntary contraceptive services to community-wide incentives and coercion. And lastly, there was little or no effort to influence investment patterns in other sectors of development to achieve the overall goal of fertility reduction.
The effectiveness of a programme is conditioned by the point of view of the analyst. Proponents of family planning programmes usually interpret a decline in fertility as an indication of the success, whereas detractors interpret it as reflecting changes in broader socioeconomic environment. Both the actual (measured) and the perceived effectiveness of a country's family planning programme are affected by the indicator use to measure its effectiveness - whether population size, population growth rate, birth rate, total fertility rate, or contraceptive prevalence rate (p 5).
The population growth rate in India, for instance, has remained virtually stagnant over the 1961-1991 period. A lack of decline in the annual population growth rate created an impression within and outside India of the failure of its population policy and family planning programme. In fact, India's birth and death rates have declined by the same order of magnitude, which means, in effect, that both the health and the family planning programmes have been successful.
Jain talks of the difficulty in ascertaining a cause and effect relationship between policy intervention and demographic change. The task of identifying a common set of factors responsible for fertility transition becomes even more difficult. Nevertheless, conditions favourable to fertility decline seem to include low infant and child mortality, high female literacy and education, and a family planning programme that provides information and services for contraceptive methods (p 7).
The role played by political leaders in the four countries vis-à-vis population policies has been well-documented. Leaders in Egypt and Kenya saw population size as "good" for the country. Number mean power, power means strength, which is good. This was the logic. President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt did not recognise the impact of rapid population growth during the first decade of his presidency; Anwar Sadat paid little attention to the problem; Hosni Mubarak too paid scant heed to it for the first three years.
All three came from a military background where the demographic weight of a country was perceived as its inherent strength. The story in Kenya was similar. Since its independence in 1963, most of its leaders were influenced by socialist paradigms and felt rapid socioeconomic development would solve all ills. Mexico remained pronatalist till the early Seventies. It were the country's intellectuals who played an important role in influencing policymakers about demographic issues (p 8).
The commitment to population policy has varied over time within and between countries. Political commitment at the highest level in Kenya and Mexico was essential for the implementation of an effective policy. However, a strong political commitment, because of the way it was implemented, produced a longlasting backlash in India (p 9).
Religious groups and their doctrines too have proven to be one of population advocates' fiercest opponents. Religion, by nature, pronounces its laws and edicts as ultimate and immutable truths. This is especially so in its codification of sexual and reproductive behaviour. In the four countries in question, however, the role of religious groups did not have a decisive impact on population policies. The Catholic Church in Mexico and Kenya, Islamic leaders and groups in Egypt, and Hindu and Muslim groups in India all had limited slowdown effects, but did not determine the final outcome of population policies.
It has only been in the last decade that feminists have begun to assert a major influence on population policy formulation. Both at the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, women activists helped advance the notion of integrating comprehensive reproductive health services and gender equality within population policies.
Nongovernmental organisations continue to be among the most influential actors in the policymaking process. Donor agencies and international NGOs have greatly influenced the economic transformation in many developing countries and, in doing so, have set the agenda for their population programmes. Without them, many countries could not effectively implement ambitious plans for improving the quality and expanding the scope of family planning services (p 11).
Effective public policies depend more than they should on the degree of political commitment to the ideals imbedded in them. A policy is a government's guiding principle or intended course of action on a matter of national significance. Policies, hence, are a formal articulation of a government's current thinking on a given subject.
The formulation and implementation if population policies emerge from domestic and international conditions that affect the outcome of other policies as well. The four case studies in this book - that of Egypt, India, Kenya and Mexico - address the basic issue: "Do population policies matter?" Population policymaking are examined and the politics surrounding it too are looked at from historical and contemporary perspectives in individual country contexts.
The four countries were selected for their demographic weight, a long history of population policies and programmes, and evidence of fertility decline. The methodology used was unique. Each study was based on sources that reflected perceptions of population policies and issues within a country: analyses of official documents, public statements, parliamentary records, mass media, and religious commentaries.
