Contested Reproductions: Population Control, Abortion Regimes, and Reproductive Governmentality

This session examines the historical and contemporary governance of reproduction through feminist perspectives. It invites papers on population control, family planning, abortion bans and restrictions, pronatalist policies, sterilization, reproductive health policies, eugenic practices, and anti-gender politics. Rather than treating reproductive control as a single legal or policy issue, the session approaches it as a field of governmentality in which gendered bodies, populations, families, and futures are made objects of knowledge, intervention, and contestation.

We welcome historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of how states, legal systems, medical institutions, religious authorities, development agencies, and social movements regulate fertility, pregnancy, contraception, abortion, childbirth, and reproductive decision-making. Papers may address colonial and postcolonial population policies, Cold War family planning, authoritarian reproductive regimes, neoliberal responsibilization, demographic crisis, fertility decline, migration, disability, race, class, sexuality, religion, and reproductive technologies. The session aims to explore how reproduction becomes a contested site where gendered power, demographic anxieties, state projects, biomedical authority, and feminist resistance intersect.