GWS Faculty Shout Out – Leigh Senderowicz

Professor Leigh Senderowicz’s important new article – that was over a decade in the writing – has major impact!

Professor Senderowicz explains the history and acheivement of her paper, co-authored with Dr. Rishita Nandagiri:

I’m proud of publishing this overtly feminist work in a demography journal. The article urges demographers (and others) to reconsider the long-established ways that neo-Malthusian (or antinatalist, if you prefer) ideology can (or in our opinion, cannot) be reconciled with a rightsbased to global reproductive health.

In 1994, at the big International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo, feminists entered into an alliance with population controllers in order to oppose the Vatican and the Religious Right, and promote access to contraception around the world. At the time, these two groups were called “strange bedmates,” (hence the title of the paper). But now they’re not considered such strange bedmates anymore, as in the intervening 30 years, the tensions that initially existed between the population control rationale for family planning and the reproductive rights rationale have been papered over. So in this article we critically evaluate what’s going on with these “strange bedmates” three decades, and the implications of this alliance for reproductive well-being around the world today.

An abstract of “Thirty years of ‘strange bedmates’: The ICPD and the nexus of population control, feminism, and family planning”:

Widely credited with ending population control and ushering in a new era of reproductive rights, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action also included some important compromises. The commemoration of ICPD+30 presents an opportune moment toreflect critically on those compromises and their i mplications for family planning programmes in the three decades since. Here, we critically examine how these compromises have enabled population control logics to flourish within global family planning programmes and the ways that neo-Malthusian concerns still
motivate contraceptive programming under co-opted feminist rhetoric. We argue that rather than binary stances of ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ contraception, the post-ICPD landscape includes multiple contested positions, including: (1) concern for reproductive rights and autonomy; (2) concern over fertility or population dynamics; and (3) opposition to biomedical contraception and abortion. Setting out the intersecting and diverging tenets of these ideologies, we call for more critical reflection on these tangled histories and engagement with reproductive justice during ICPD+30. See full text article here.

The New Yorker quotes Senderowicz in reference to her research!:

“Most left-leaning Americans are similarly distrustful of the pro-natalist discourse. Leigh Senderowicz, a feminist demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.'” See full New Yorker article here.

Social media posts on the exciting launch of this article: