Panelists: Dr. Amna Qayyum and Dr. Shayan Rajani
Where: Live on SWGI Facebook

This talk focuses on the founding of the Family Planning Association of Pakistan (FPA) in 1952, and analyzes how elite Pakistani women's welfare activists and American eugenicists drew on intersecting transnational currents of racialized and class-based knowledge, along with concerns over maternal health, to introduce new methods of birth control in Pakistan. In so doing, this talk uncovers the state-private links that enabled the institutionalization of family planning programs in Pakistan in the early-to-mid 1950s, at a time when both the Pakistani and U.S government shied away from an official stance on such programs. It then charts how, by the late 1950s, such voluntary programs were increasingly tied to conceptions of the national economy, providing the ground for masculinist programs of population control in the following decade.