Reproductive Dreams

Perhaps unsurprisingly, anxieties about reproduction -- is there too much of it? Not enough? Are the 'right' people producing the 'right' number of babies? Can we, and should we intervene in anyone's baby-making to ensure that those offspring are better than their parents, or perhaps 'better than well'? -- have permeated societies around the world at least since the age of Thomas Malthus. Perhaps the most famous and most infamous vehicle for these concerns has been eugenics. This approach to generating a future of 'perfect humans' has underpinned social imaginings and responses to 'degeneration', the 'Population Bomb', the 'Great Replacement' and today the 'De-Population Bomb' or ZPG. Visible in literature from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and the fevered imaginings of many of today's most prominent conspiracy theorists, we will finish off the week by exploring the relationship between the possibilities afforded by technologies of fertility and population control and fears about their outcomes.

Weekly Questions:

• What drove the emergence of (reasonably) effective fertility control -- and for whom?
• Why is fertility control so controversial? Where and when do controversies emerge, and where and when do they decline?
• What does a 'perfect' family look like, and to whom?
• Whose reproductivity is laudable, and whose should be controlled? By whom and when?
• Should humanity strive to perfect itself? What would 'perfect' conceptions/contraception look like?