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Family planning and population control in developing countries

This essay aims at a critical analysis of the major assumptions of the family planning movement and their implications for population and development policy in the less developed countries. A neo-Malthusian perspective, in which a reduction of the current high rates of population growth is considered to be a necessary condition for economic development in the less developed countries, is dominant among professionals in family planning. Population control has come to be regarded as a kind of“leading sector” in the development process. The position taken in this paper is that the contention that fertility reduction is crucial to short term economic development is not substantiated empirically and represents a distorted view of the economic development process. Nor is there good evidence that demographic modernization can move far ahead of other aspects of modernization. Skepticism about the success of family planning tends to lead to advocacy of alternative methods of population control which are generally beyond the economic, administrative, and political capacities of the less developed countries and are sometimes repressive in tone. The family planning movement, in overstressing the independent contributions of fertility reduction programs, has tended to underplay conditions such as improved health, lowered mortality, and altered opportunity structure which make these contributions possible at all.