IUDs, Vasectomies, and the Biopolitics of Modernization in Pakistan, 1965–71

In 1965, the Government of Pakistan rolled out an expansive and incentivized national Family Planning Scheme totalling $62. The New York Times labeled it as the most “ambitious birth control effort undertaken in any country” - which, in terms of funding, it was for the time. Armed with both old and new contraceptive technologies, the Family Planning Scheme embarked on an aggressive project to regulate fertility, and also shape socio-cultural norms.

This paper centers reproduction to analyze intersections between Cold War development politics and authoritarian forms of governance. Broadly, it asks: how can centering reproduction help us rethink histories of development? It examines how gender and demography emerge as particular areas of intervention in projects of modernization. In particular, it examines two particular “weapons'' deployed in the “fight” for population control - the IUD and vasectomy - by the Pakistani state. By teasing out the motivations, global networks, and targeted users of these two technologies it examines the frictions emerging between postcolonial sovereignty and US-led global biopolitical regimes. At the same time, it examines how the coercive modalities of this population control program were reconfigured, and contested, by everyday citizens. In so doing, this paper analyzes how the “biopolitics of modernization” emerged as a contested terrain in which a range of actors - citizens, foreign experts, and bureaucrats - both accommodated and resisted authoritarian forms of governance and Cold War geopolitics.