Introduction: The Global Transfer of Techniques of Population Control in the 20th Century

Referent/in: Veronika Lipphardt, Berlin / Corinna R. Unger, Bremen

Abstract

In our introduction, we will situate the panel in current research on demography and population politics and show how the issue of population control offers a unique perspective on global history in the 20th century. The introduction will discuss key questions with regard to the methodological and conceptual challenges of writing global, or transnational, history. It will also debate the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches – in this case, demography, history, history of science, biology, and sociology – and suggest related questions that can be taken up in the discussion following the presentations.

The Globalization of Laparoscopic Sterilization

Referent/in: Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Cambridge

Abstract

The globalization of tubal ligation in the 1970s Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge) Abstract In the early 1960s, tubal ligation (female sterilization) was a risky in-patient procedure performed under general anesthesia in a hospital setting. International family planning organizations promoted vasectomy (male sterilization) instead, but women were still seen as ideal targets of surgical intervention. So in the late 1960s, resources were redirected towards the development of safer and more practicable forms of tubal ligation. In the early 1970s, a new key-hole (laparoscopic) surgical procedure known as “spring-clip sterilization” went from preliminary animal testing in North Carolina to large-scale clinical trials in Bangkok, Bombay, London, San Salvador, and Singapore. Today, tubal ligation is one of the most popular forms of contraception worldwide, and spring-clips continue to be used in hospitals. This paper shows how the globalization of tubal ligation was initiated by a special research and training program set up by American funding agencies (Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID) with a shared concern for global population control. Founded in 1966 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Carolina Population Center (CPC) operated like a small on-campus foundation, channeling money from these agencies into various departments to establish new courses, recruit faculty, conduct research, and develop new technologies. As part of these initiatives, gynecological surgeon Jaroslav Hulka (b. 1930) developed a new procedure for the surgical insertion of so-called “Hulka clips”, miniature plastic clothespin-like instruments with metal teeth that clamp over and partially destroy the fallopian tubes, causing sterility. Compared to other forms of tubal ligation available to women at the time, this procedure was promoted as relatively safe, practicable, and inexpensive. Furthermore, it could be performed with local anesthetics on an outpatient basis in remote and poorly equipped locations far from any hospital. In the eyes of international family planning organizations, Hulka clips made tubal ligation “competitive” with vasectomy for the first time. On their promise it was hoped that more “Third World women” of childbearing age – the chief targets of family planning programs – would be willing to go under the knife. It was Hulka’s plastic clip that first enabled tubal ligation to go global. Even so, historians tend to “black box” surgical procedures, thereby concealing a diversity of instruments and practices, excluding them from narratives of international family planning. By focusing on the Hulka clip as a case study, this paper suggests how historians might broadly engage with surgical techniques and technologies, thereby producing a more nuanced account of the struggle to control global population.

An Anglican Nun, New Hebridean Nurses and Indigenous Women: Assemblages in the Attempts to Increase the Population in the New Hebrides

Referent/in: Alexandra Widmer, Berlin 

Abstract

In the 1960s Betty Pyatt, an Anglican missionary nurse from New Zealand, set up a school in the New Hebrides (called Vanuatu since 1980) to train New Hebridean women to be nurses. The nursing school was but one institutional intervention in a century of Christian missionaries’ and colonial officials’ modest attempts to stop the catastrophic population decline in the New Hebrides. Pyatt’s years in the New Hebrides span remarkable social and demographic change: at the beginning of her time in the 1940s, Pyatt told me that indigenous women (woman blong ples in the lingua franca Bislama) asked her how to conceive more children, while by the 1970s she was being asked for contraception information. Clearly, the population growth that followed the long decades of decline cannot be attributed to knowledge and technology transfers and institutional interventions in a straightforward sense. In this paper, I describe the nursing school curriculum, the experiences of New Hebridean nurses who delivered maternity care and the birthing stories of women who were under their care. My intent in analyzing this context is to show how attempts at implementing technologies and knowledge in colonial situations involved complex assemblages of Christian service, governance, biomedical techniques, indigenous fertility knowledge and gendered aspirations for the future.  

Visualizing Population Changes: Pictorial Statistics and Global Demography

Referent/in: Sybilla Nikolow, Bielefeld

Abstract

In the twentieth century, demographic knowledge was widely communicated across cultural and language barriers with the help of visual statistics. In my contribution, I use Otto Neurath’s pictorial statistics as a case study to demonstrate how visual images were used to facilitate international discourses about social change. Ideas about “overpopulation” and the need to regulate reproductive behavior figured prominently in those discourses, and I analyze how the visual practices employed by Neurath strengthened or underminded contemporary perceptions about demographic developments. Neurath’s search for a global visual language will be contrasted with other, more conventional efforts to visualize population change in the 1930s. I will discuss the different concepts of the social body that were displayed using particular styles of representation. By focusing on visual sources, I contribute to the historical discussion on globality, with an emphasis on the production, circulation and public adoption of concepts of world population. The potential globality of visual concepts like pictorial statistics as well as their limits will be discussed.