Fertility decline – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Aya Homei

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world’s most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan’s Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government’s effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, ‘population’ (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science.

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By Silvia De Zordo, Diana Marre and Marcin Smietana

This double special issue sheds light on the “demographic anxieties” provoked by the articulations of major social and political-economic processes that have affected reproductive politics (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991) and practices over the last decades around the world, in particular: fertility decline, the simultaneous development of sophisticated prenatal and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and the austerity policies adopted after the 2008 economic crisis on a global scale, in a context of rising nationalism. The authors explore demographic anxieties concerning, on the one hand, fertility decline, the postponement of motherhood and population aging, and, on the other hand, the reproductive behavior of specific social groups (e.g., religious/ethnic minorities and low-income populations). They illustrate how these anxieties emerge and are mobilized as mechanisms of reproductive governance across the global North and South (Fonseca et al. 2021; Morgan and Roberts 2012), in contexts marked by growing social inequalities resulting from the application of neo-liberal policies and austerity measures, which make reproductive choices, and futures, increasingly difficult and precarious.

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