What’s so troubling about voluntary family planning anyway?

Nandagiri, R. (2021). What’s so troubling about ‘voluntary’family planning anyway? A feminist perspective. Population Studies, 75(sup1), 221-234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1996623

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Demography and Population Studies as a discipline– technically, my PhD was linked with/tied to Demography but I always felt a little out of place, always wondering where my work sits, who it is in conversation with, and how it is received. While I have since carved out a bit of a niche for myself in “critical Demography” or “Qual Demography”, I worry about how my work interacts with the space. I still sit rather uncomfortably in the space.

However, my critiques and engagement must have some resonance as Professors Wendy Sigle, Alice Reid, & Rebecca Sear very kindly invited me to contribute to the Population Studies 75th anniversary issue.

This was not an easy article to write. There was a lot of back and forth, and I struggled to articulate my arguments in a way that could be heard by an audience that might not be familiar with the theoretical frameworks I was drawing on (Foucault! Discourse!). At an early workshop, a senior professor suggested that my use of theory might risk losing my intended audience. That tension stayed with me throughout.

One of the reviewers noted that many critiques of demography have historically come from outside the discipline, and Professor Sigle encouraged me to think about the role of a “critical friend.” I’ve held onto that idea- how to work within a field while also challenging it, and how to push at its boundaries in ways that are hopefully productive.

At its core, this paper asks what we mean when we describe family planning as “voluntary.” The term is often taken for granted, as though it simply denotes individual choice or autonomy. But drawing on feminist and critical approaches, I argue that “voluntary” family planning is far from neutral, it is shaped by histories of population control, development agendas, and uneven power relations.

Rather than treating choice as given, I ask how choices are produced, structured, and constrained. Who is able to choose? Under what conditions? And how do broader systems of governance shape what comes to feel like an individual decision?

In that sense, the paper shifts family planning from a technical or policy domain into a site of power, politics, and contestation. It asks to take seriously the ways in which even seemingly benign concepts like “voluntariness” are embedded in longer histories of control and domination, and persistent inequalities.

It was not an easy article to write & there is a lot more I’d like to say (e.g., on race & racism, on demography’s understanding of itself and of eugenics) but perhaps one day I will find a way to say it in a way that it can be heard. I’ve presented this work a fair bit and have received pretty positive feedback (and some less than ideal feedback), so it seems to have hit a chord (or struck a nerve, depending on how you see it). Perhaps that’s part of being a critical friend too?