The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History

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.

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.