Tool of economic development, metric of global health: Promoting planned families and economized life in Nepal

Jan Brunson

Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 254, issue C

Abstract: In contemporary global health and development discourses, contraception is cast in multiple roles: an antipoverty tool at the household level, a tool of economic development at the national level, a smart investment with net gains, a means of empowering women, a way of lowering maternal mortality ratios. In order to examine such discursive uses of contraception – and their implications for women – in a concrete way, I use a compelling case of the history of the promotion of planned families in Nepal and a recent social and behavior change communication contraception campaign designed in the US. Using social text analysis to examine this multi-year, multi-platform campaign in Nepal, I found that the advertisements present idealized images of “smart couples:” progressive, middle-class families engaged in rationalistic family planning to delay and space their offspring. A major theme identified, aspirations to be middle class, links these specific family planning behaviors to upward economic mobility. The small-family ideal previously promoted in the global South had outlived its relevance as Nepal and other countries reached near replacement-level fertility rates. The gradual historical refashioning in Nepal of a discourse that promotes the “small family” to one that promotes the modern “smart couple” is an illustrative example of the global trend in which a message of replacement-level fertility is repackaged as a message of delaying and spacing births under the guise of health, as funding agencies promote contraceptive adoption as a women's health issue. Underlying this discursive repackaging, however, is a continued economization of life and health.

Keywords: Nepal; Global health; Contraception; Fertility; Family planning; Indicators; Maternal health; Reproductive health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361930259X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:254:y:2020:i:c:s027795361930259x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.05.003

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().