The Gospel of Family Planning

An Intimate Global History

Nicole C. Bourbonnais

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English

University of Chicago Press
08 June 2025

Family & health

An engaging, insightful history of the family planning movement and its connection to broader social and political developments across the globe.

Historical accounts of the twentieth-century global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and government programs. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, historian Nicole C. Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers—doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers—who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role.

Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, Bourbonnais visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, ground-level workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programs, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them. Throughout the book, Bourbonnais invites readers to consider how the intertwined histories of missionary work, humanitarianism, feminism, decolonization, and international development shaped intimate interventions into people's reproductive lives around the world.

By: Nicole C. Bourbonnais
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 367g
ISBN: 9780226840802
ISBN 10: 0226840808
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 08 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction Chapter One Prophets Chapter Two Practice Chapter Three Crisis of Faith Chapter Four Redemption? Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Nicole C. Bourbonnais is associate professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean.

Reviews for The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History

""Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this book makes clear that ordinary providers and recipients of reproductive health care shaped the global history of family planning in critical and sometimes contradictory ways. Drawing from archival and oral history sources, the book offers a compelling new approach to the history of twentieth-century family planning and to global history itself.""-- ""Mytheli Sreenivas, author of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India"" ""With a keen analytic eye, Bourbonnais's history of twentieth-century family planning foregrounds materials and practices as much as ideas and lobbyists. This impressive book spans geographies and communities, scaling in to the intimate and out to the international. A much-needed, fresh account.""-- ""Alison Bashford, author of Global Population""