Science,Modernity, and the Making of China's One‐Child Policy

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual “population crisis” and that the one‐child policy was “the only solution” to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.     

Longevity Advances in High‐Income Countries, 1955–96

The advance of life expectancy within high‐income countries from 1955 to 1996 is well represented by a straight‐line trend. This explains more of the variance on average, and in 19 of 21 high‐income countries, than logged or unlogged age‐standardized death rates. Change in life expectancy in individual countries over this period was partially predicted by a country's level relative to the rest of this group of high‐income countries and partially by a country's own prior rate of advance, with substantial convergence toward the group mean for both measures.     

Abortion,Family Planning,and Population Policy: Prospects for the Common‐Ground Approach

For the past several decades those engaged in shaping the Program of Action documents at international conferences on population have muted their voices when the topic of abortion has been raised. In a desire to side‐step entanglement in a bitter debate over the morality of abortion, great care has been taken to define “family planning” in ways that explicitly exclude abortion. The “common‐ground” approach to treating abortion can be summarized in two directives found in all contemporary international population documents: “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning”; and all governments should work “to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and improved family‐planning services.” This article has three goals: first, to examine the appropriateness of these directives with respect to what is currently known about the relationship between abortion, family planning, and population policy; second, to trace how this “contraception‐only” definition of family planning became de rigueur at international population conferences; and third, to discuss the prospects for the emergence of a more appropriate “common‐ground” approach to abortion and population policy.     

The Patterns of Disability in the Peripheral Neighborhoods of Ouagadougou,Burkina Faso,and the Male–Female Health‐Survival Paradox

Disability is a crucial health and social concern in sub‐Saharan Africa, where a high prevalence of disabling diseases is compounded with insufficient care provision. There is a need for detailed analysis of the disability patterns. We provide a gender‐specific picture for the population in peripheral Ouagadougou (Burkina‐Faso), based on six disability dimensions following the United Nations’ recommendations. We computed disability‐free life expectancy (LE) using the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (Ouaga HDSS) (n = 1 902). Women have a longer partial LE in the 20–79 age range (+3.3 years), half of this LE being spent with a disability, versus 31% of the LE for men. Limitations in mobility, cognition, and eyesight occur in midadulthood and result in a considerable disadvantage for women in the number of years with these limitations. These findings highlight disability patterns that are detrimental to social participation and claim for better screening and care, especially for women.     

Longevity Among Hunter‐ Gatherers: A Cross‐Cultural Examination

Post‐reproductive longevity is a robust feature of human life and not only a recent phenomenon caused by improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical advances. We argue for an adaptive life span of 68‐78 years for modern Homo sapiens based on our analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small‐scale hunter‐gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world. We compare patterns of survivorship across the life span, rates of senescence, modal ages at adult death, and causes of death. We attempt to reconcile our results with those derived from paleodemographic studies that characterize prehistoric human lives as “nasty, brutish, and short,” and with observations of recent acculturation among contemporary subsistence populations. We integrate information on age‐specific dependency and resource production to help explain the adaptive utility of longevity in humans from an evolutionary perspective.     

Well‐Being,Front and Center: A Note on the Sarkozy Report

The Sarkozy Report is a study commissioned by the French President on better ways to measure the level and progress of societal well‐being than conventional economic indicators such as GDP. Despite being prepared by prominent economists—the commission was led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean‐Paul Fitoussi—the Report rejects reliance on “production‐oriented” measures of progress in favor of a broader array of quality‐of‐life indicators, some of them subjective, and measures of the sustainability of well‐being into the future. These multiple dimensions of well‐being, it argues, should be used in policy decisions and welfare evaluations. The views expressed in the Report may portend a sea‐change in the way economists think about the benefits of economic growth.     

Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980–2010

This article compares the fertility patterns of women in consensual union and marriage in 13 Latin American countries, using census microdata from the four most recent census rounds and a methodological approach that combines the own‐children method and Poisson regression. Results show that in all these countries, fertility is slightly higher within consensual union than marriage and that the age pattern of fertility is very similar in marital and non‐marital unions. Further analyses show that over the period considered, childbearing within a consensual union has changed from rare to increasingly common, although not yet mainstream, for highly educated women in most countries examined. Results show that in Latin America, at least since the 1980s, women's childbearing patterns depend on their age and on their being in a conjugal relationship, but not on the legal nature of this relationship. The similarities in reproductive behavior between marital and non‐marital unions are not confined to the socially disadvantaged groups, but apply as well to the better off.     

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers and the Prehistory of the IUSSP

Captain George Henry Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers, Secretary General of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP, 1928–ca. 1942), the precursor of today's International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP, 1947–present), was a central figure in population science during the 1930s. With his pro‐Nazi activism, anti‐Semitism, Red‐baiting, and failure to leave any intellectual mark of consequence, he is an idiosyncratic and in some ways unattractive subject. However, an examination of Pitt‐Rivers's role as Secretary General reveals a wealth of information about the IUSIPP as it lurched toward collapse. It casts light, as well, on the struggle for scientific legitimacy between eugenic racialists and reformers in the 1930s, a struggle in which he played a controversial and divisive role. Using a combination of newly discovered and old archival material, this article traces Pitt‐Rivers's involvement with the Union, the British eugenics establishment, Nazi population science, and far‐right British politics during this turbulent decade when demography emerged as an international discipline.