The Politics of Contraception

Although global fertility rates are starting to decline, the world's population will still increase by several billion before stabilizing some time in the first half of the 21st century; thus, there is little justification for complacency. Since a quarter of the world's population lives in China, what happens there in terms of limits on fertility in the long run affects us all. During the past dozen years there have been startling changes in China, in both the politics and the practice of birth control.Visits by Western scientists began in the early 1970's at the end of the Cultural Revolution. . . .