In the twentieth century, the idea that people should consciously plan – and limit – the size of their families became a global cause. It was taken up by grassroots family planning associations, governments, international organisations, and foreign aid agencies alike, leading to unprecedented interventions in people’s intimate lives around the world.
The Gospel of Family Planning tells the history of this movement by focusing on those who did its daily labour: the doctors, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, and volunteers who knocked on doors to hand out pamphlets, opened clinics, held talks in village squares, and ran contraceptive research trials. The book traces the diverse political, personal, material, and spiritual concerns that drove these actors to the family planning cause, and the frictions that arose when their simple prophecy confronted the much more complex realities of people’s reproductive lives. It illustrates the critical role played by intermediate actors as both gatekeepers and allies to communities targeted by increasingly aggressive population control programs. Finally, it shows how experiences on the front lines led some to abandon the cause of family planning altogether, joining movements for reproductive rights and justice that put forward much broader visions of reproductive freedom.
About the speaker
Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research explores how people’s intimate lives have been shaped by global politics and transnational social activism across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is the author of two books – Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) – as well as a number of articles/chapters on themes of gender, sexuality, decolonisation, maternalism, and global health. Her current research project traces the history and politics of maternity at the World Health Organization from the 1940s to the present, focusing on four key fields: death (the production of statistics around maternal mortality), birth (evolving guidelines for pregnancy and childbirth), breast (recommendations surrounding infant feeding) and mind (efforts to recognize and address maternal mental health issues). She is also writing a short book on the history and social theory of parenting (under contract with Polity Press).
This keynote is part of the international workshop Race and Sexual and Reproductive Health in Historical Perspectives organised by the Gender Centre with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
