Family Planning Laws

Family planning laws are laws pertaining to birth control, abortion, and permissible family size, as well as restrictions on the dissemination of information regarding these and other reproductive health issues. Family planning laws have varied widely throughout history, and they continue to create significant ethical and cultural controversy around the world today.

History

• Throughout history, women have used family planning techniques including chemical and barrier birth control and chemical abortifacients, as well as breastfeeding which tends to limit fertility. These methods went unregulated by law until the 15th century, when the Inquisition declared most midwives to be heretics and witches, and laws in some European countries required that childbirth be attended by men from the newly-emerging profession of medical surgeons. Despite the Inquisition, childbirth and family planning remained the province primarily of women until the mid-18th century when male physicians began to dominate the medical profession, including birth control advice and birthing assistance.

Time Frame

• Social workers concerned with the burden of large families on poor mothers in the 1830s began advocating for advances in birth control technology and family planning. After the Civil War fear of low birthrates of upper class white families led states to adopt laws banning abortion. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Law banning distribution of contraception and reproductive health information. The women's rights movements of the 1920s together with nativist backlash against large immigrant families led to retraction of state birth control and abortion bans. Eugenics programs arose in which social planners sought to improve humankind by intensive family planning and sterilizing "undesirables." These programs disintegrated after the Third Reich took them to utterly untenable extremes, which demonstrated their fallacy. In the 1960s the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the last state law against providing contraception information on the grounds that the ban violated marital privacy, and in 1973 they declared laws banning abortion to be illegal on the same grounds. Family planning once again became legal in the United States.

Considerations

• Family planning laws are rife with ethical and moral considerations. These range from the fundamental question of whether governments should intercede at all in personal sexual and reproductive relationships, to whether it is appropriate to legally limit family size in the face of population strains, to whether abortion comprises a legitimate family planning method or a means of government-sanctioned murder. Countries and cultures around the world resolve these questions differently, and in some areas they form the basis of domestic unrest.

Types

• Family planning laws include restrictions on family size, such as China's law prohibiting many families from having more than one child. Other family planning laws pertain to the regulation of lawful birth-control methods, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulatory approval of pharmaceuticals for emergency contraception in the late 1990s. Funding measures form another type of family planning law. American federal law prohibits funding any foreign women's health projects that include abortion services. In 2009, President Obama repealed a small portion of this family planning funding law, which had previously prohibited use of U.S. aid money for any health programs which included advising or educating women regarding abortion as a medical option even in cases of rape or health threat to the mother.

Effects

• The effects of family planning laws are complex and controversial. Chinese government officials claim that China's one-law policy has prevented hundreds of millions of births since its inception, and has thus spared families from poverty and national resources from depletion. Critics say it has had the effect of creating a gender imbalance based on female infanticide, and created an atmosphere of fear amongst couples of childbearing age. The effect of legalizing abortion in the United States and elsewhere around the world has been to prompt sharp cultural divisions and protests by segments of the population who oppose abortion on moral and religious grounds. Funding restriction laws have had the effect of curtailing reproductive health education and services in impoverished or war-torn nations, resulting in increased childbearing burdens on women living in poverty or who are victims of war-related rape.