Reproductive Health: A Public Health Perspective

Abstract

Scrutiny and control of women's sexuality and women's reproductive role by the state are well recognized in the history of societies [Sarkar 1993]. Tribal wars over possession of women were rooted in the struggle for survival of the tribe itself. Later, when households became the center of productive activities women's skill and labor began to be valued as much as their ability to give birth. With the advent of the factory system, women also became the keys to the upbringing of the labor that they reproduced. The control of women's fertility was thus considered necessary for both economic and social reasons. Studies of the 19th and early 20th century show how the institutions of religion [Chakravarti 1989], law and education [Desai and Krishnaraj 1990] perfected the
instruments of control. In the latter half of the 20th century, largely women-centered family planning programs (FPP) initiated by the government became the main instrument of this control. The appreciations of the needs of civil society in the regulation of fertility were gradually marginalised by these official programs. Demography emerged as a discipline [Bose 1988] that appropriated the area of population studies.