The Pill, feminist theory, and the scientization of population policy: Part II

Part II of our talk with Saul Halfon about his new book, The Cairo Concensus.
Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series here.

TWF: What about contraceptives? You said they were part of the technology you deal with in the book.

SH: Of course. Population control has always been about contraception - reducing births. This is very tricky terrain, strategically and analytically.

First, it is important to recognize the very long and deep history between population policy and contraceptive development. The pill, the modern IUD, Norplant and a range of other contraceptives were developed by population control organizations. Some of these histories get a bit ugly when you dig too deep. We progressives, in the West, tend to think of contraceptives as liberating, but the story is far more complicated when we look globally.

Second, as I mentioned above, contraceptive development is still closely tied to population organizations. As population rhetoric has changed, contraceptive development rhetoric has changed as well. The question remains whether such rhetorical changes deeply affect technological design. The answer is again somewhat mixed.

TWF: I like that section title, Technical Practices in the Population Network. The technical, scientific stuff is clearly right in the conversation. That's gotta be an interesting new, 20th century wrinkle, as compared to an older model of concern for population, as with Malthus I suppose. How have cultural perceptions of surveys--those are a kind of technical practice, that's what you're saying, or did I get confused?--changed over the past half century?

SH: Yes, the surveys are an important example of the kind of technical practices that I'm discussing. And yes, other analysts have largely overlooked these sorts of practices when making sense of population policy and politics. I put them right in the middle. They are so powerful and taken for granted that they are essentially invisible. The argument is that these practices set the framework for conversation and argumentation. We cannot discuss worldwide population, contraceptive needs, and fertility desires without invoking data from worldwide demographic surveys, but these surveys are extremely limited in their scope and frame, and extremely political in their inception. Thus, most discussion is locked into a material and discursive framework that disciplines possibilities and allows incredible coordination across seemingly incommensurable divides. If anything, as we have moved from simplistic and economist theories of population growth to complex cultural and political economic theories, the surveys have become increasingly important and powerful resources.

TWF: Adele Clarke said this in her blurb: You foreground "the scientization of both population policy and social movement worlds through the institutionalization of shared technical language and practices." What's that mean?

SH: I hate to speak for others, but what I think this means is pretty much my answer from above. Both policy makers and social movements have increasingly relied on technical data and arguments to frame and support their positions, and this technical data is increasingly derived from a set of technical practices (such as surveys) that are well entrenched within decision-making institutions. I'm not sure that's any clearer than how she phrased it.

TWF: Are there any crazy stories of things people did about population control in the past--and I'm thinking here probably something the Rockefeller Foundation or some such would've done in the post-1945 era--that seem a little half-baked in retrospect? They always seemed to do the strangest things, either born of ignorance, arrogance, well-meaning intentions, or all three in many other areas. Just wondering.

SH: Hmmm. That's a bit more tricky. I don't really deal with the "muckraking" stuff much in my book - that is, specific programs that went awry or those wacky characters that seem to crop up in every endeavor. I'm more interested in systemic/systematic issues. So, I can't think of any really crazy schemes, but there are well-documented abuses that have at least tenuous links to some of the key organizations. Most of these involve clinical trials using Third World women. There has always been an open dispute about the role that Western organizations, particularly the UN, has played in various abusive birth control programs, particularly in China and Indonesia. There's also some interesting language, particularly in the 1950s, about what would count as "acceptable" birth control methods in different parts of the world.

So, I would say that most of the "half-baked" schemes have to do with a moving and shaky line between what counts as "ethical" versus "unethical" or "abusive" versus "voluntary" programs. Some might claim that all of population control is a half-baked scheme based on an oversimplified understanding of power and culture, but that's really a different kind of issue.

TWF: But for the above, I don't even have any off-handed, irrelevant or facetious questions, with apologies.

SH: So then I won't have an irrelevant or facetious answer. Or will I?

TWF: How's about, could you say how you feel about the topic - of population policy, science, and technology - now that you wrote the book?

SH: Sure. Writing this book has been a journey for me both in terms of making political sense of what is going on in population policy and in analytical terms in figuring out how we can talk about the relationship between science and policy. My political stance towards population policy has shifted from disdain to what I think of as a critical appreciation. My analytical stance has matured quite significantly in terms of really appreciating how deeply intertwined political and scientific thought and practice are in such a rich arena of social life.