Population Control as a Human Right
International Law and the Global Quest to Curb Overpopulation
Author: Roman Birke Series: Human Rights in History
Roman Birke demonstrates the centrality of human rights justifications on both sides of the population control debate.
Concerns about global overpopulation spread rapidly in the 1940s and still persist today. Roman Birke demonstrates the conflicts this created between the rights of the community and the rights of the individual, and how human rights became central to the population debate at both a domestic and international level.
31st October 2025
Hardcover
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
Roman Birke demonstrates the centrality of human rights justifications on both sides of the population control debate.
Concerns about global overpopulation spread rapidly in the 1940s and still persist today. Roman Birke demonstrates the conflicts this created between the rights of the community and the rights of the individual, and how human rights became central to the population debate at both a domestic and international level.
Description
Concerns about global overpopulation spread rapidly in the 1940s and still persist today. The UN Resolution on Human Rights and Family Planning (1968) provided justifications for the argument that population growth endangered the realization of human rights and codified a right to contraception to halt this growth. Conversely, human rights were also invoked on the other side of this debate, with family planning regarded as an essential individual right independent of demographic considerations. Roman Birke explores how human rights became central to this debate, utilised by international actors including NGOs, the women's movement, international lawyers, and institutions such as the United Nations. He analyses how couples' intimate choices related to domestic and international policy, and how this varied across the world, through case studies of India, Ireland, the USA, and Yugoslavia. This is an essential contribution to the evolving literature on the role of reproductive politics in global political landscapes.
Critic Reviews
'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
About the Author
Roman Birke is a historian of human rights, humanitarianism and international norms at the University of Regensburg.
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31st October 2025
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