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The International Planned Parenthood Federation

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Feminism and International Relations

Part of the book series: International Political Economy Series ((IPES))

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Abstract

If international relations have always affected gender relations, then at a minimum we must be able to illustrate this by looking to the practices of international relations and documenting the manner in which gender relations figure there.1 The purpose of this chapter, then, will be to illustrate an analysis of gender in international relations through the example of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). In order that this may be more than a liberal feminist account of ‘women in the IPPF’, however, it will be done not by providing a history of the IPPF with women ‘added in’, but by exploring the ways in which ideas about gender and the particular historical and material conditions in which the institution operated affected its assumptions, policies and prescriptions. We will be concerned, moreover, with the ways in which the institution itself reflected and manipulated understandings about gender and the impact this had in the real life conditions of women and men.

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Notes

  1. Beryl Suitters, Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London: IPPF, 1973), p. 2.

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  25. IPPF, The Human Right to Family Planning: Report of the Working Group on the Promotion of Family Planning as a Basic Human Right (London: IPPF, 1984), p. 8.

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  50. Many population programmes are extremely coercive. Some provide incentive payments to recipients of birth control measures while others employ more overt coercive techniques. The most dramatic known example may be the case of India during the 1970s in which individual states were permitted to introduce compulsory sterilization legislation and the crash programme of sometimes forced sterilization which followed resulted in eleven million sterilizations (a large proportion of which were vasectomies) between June of 1975 and March 1977, as compared with 1.3 million in the 1974–75 period. See Henry P. David, ‘Incentives, Reproductive Behaviour and Integrated Community Development in Asia’, Studies in Family Planning, 13(5), May, 1982, p. 166

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. York University, Ontario, Canada

    Sandra Whitworth (Associate Professor of Political Science)

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  1. Sandra Whitworth
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© 1997 Sandra Whitworth

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Whitworth, S. (1997). The International Planned Parenthood Federation. In: Feminism and International Relations. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-37162-0_5

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