Population Control as a Human Right

‘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

Roman Birke is a historian of human rights, humanitarianism and international norms at the University of Regensburg.