Debating “Abadi”: Family Planning, Expertise, and the State in Pakistan, 1958–71

During Ayub Khan’s regime the Pakistani state embarked on a ambitious and wide-ranging program of population control, and in 1961 became the second country in the world to adopt official policies on fertility. For social scientists and government officials in Pakistan, population control programs was primarily linked to political economy (as opposed to later conceptions where the language of reproductive rights and health also featured significantly). Family planning programs were popularized heavily through publicity campaigns, and citizens in both urban and rural spaces were urged through varied communication channels to practice birth control. US government agencies, private foundations, and academic institutions provided the main sources of funding and expertise for these programs in Pakistan.

This paper examines the intellectual genealogies of the statist push for adopting family planning in Pakistan, and traces the ways in which the ideas of Pakistani and American social scientists coalesced on the question of women’s bodies and reproductive practices. Focusing primarily of the work of Pakistani and US experts at the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development at Comilla, this paper argues that population control became a crucial site for debating the role of US development aid and expertise to Pakistan by a wide range of actors - including ulama, journalists, and peasants. These issues worked on different, interrelated, levels. Family planning programs were intended to inscribe themselves, and transform, the everyday life of Pakistani citizens. They provided an avenue to debate the role of women and religion for a vision of post-colonial Pakistan that was still under construction. At the same time these programs also became a site to critically examine Pakistan’s Cold War alignment with the United States. The paper offers a granular reading of how the statist push for family planning programs under Ayub Khan was implemented and often, questioned, by Pakistani citizens.