The Vasectomy Clause: Reproductive Fiqh and the Unfinished Decolonisation of Population Policy in Indonesia

This article examines reproductive governance in Indonesia through the contested discourse on male contraception, particularly the proposal in West Java to link access to social assistance (BANSOS) with participation in a vasectomy programme. Existing studies have largely approached family planning through demographic, biomedical, and technocratic perspectives, leaving insufficient attention to Islamic legal reasoning as an independent framework for evaluating reproductive policy. Employing a qualitative socio-legal approach informed by decolonial methodology, Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social construction, and Jasser Auda’s systems approach to maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah, this study analyses policy documents, public statements, Islamic legal materials, and relevant secondary literature. The analysis indicates that the proposed welfare-conditional vasectomy policy reproduced a technocratic mode of reproductive governance in which economically vulnerable bodies risked becoming instruments of demographic management. Islamic legal reasoning, however, provided an alternative evaluative framework centred on human dignity, non-coercion, protection from harm, and relational responsibility. The study argues that maqāṣid-based reasoning can function as a counter-epistemology within reproductive governance by challenging demographic reductionism while enabling a more contextual assessment of male contraception. The West Java case therefore illustrates how reproductive policy in Indonesia is negotiated among state authority, Islamic legal norms, social welfare concerns, and competing conceptions of reproductive justice.