Population Control as a Human Right

Roman Birke is Assistant Professor in Modern European History at Dublin City University.

'This original and important work analyzes the surprising and contradictory ways in which advocates of population control invoked human rights as a justification for their policies from the 1940s on. Roman Birke reconstructs decades of debate about whether population control was a collective human right or an individual one; whether individual rights to control reproduction could be violated-even coercively- in the interests of society as a whole; whether population control was a prerequisite for realizing human rights or promoting social and economic human rights was the key to population control. Birke's meticulous analysis of the discourses of proponents and opponents of population control as a human right is accompanied by insightful case studies of how these debates played out in diverse national contexts. Population Control as a Human Right provocatively challenges prevailing understandings of the histories of human rights and of global reproductive politics.' Mary Nolan, New York University

• 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.