Exploring Swedish ‘Family Planning’: Reproductive Racism and Reproductive Justice

Abstract

AbstractIn Sweden, during the parliamentary election campaign in 2022, birth control and family planning were identified as practices that could solve all variety of social problems, from poverty to crime. They were also presented as a solution to migrant women’s supposed lack of integration into Swedish society.Criticism towards discourses and policies of family planning is extensive, from scholars challenging the notion of ‘voluntariness’ to those arguing that, in family planning, women’s lives are subordinated to economic and developmental goals. While contraceptive technologies hold an impressive emancipatory power in the lives of women globally, vulnerable groups of women have, in the name of family planning, experienced forced sterilisation and reproductive coercion.This chapter aims to analyse political discourses and governmental policies on reproduction through the conceptual lens of reproductive racism. We hope to challenge what we identify as historical amnesia concerning Swedish ‘family planning’ and show how, in different ways, reproductive rights in Sweden are inscribed and embedded into racial inequalities.The empirical material presented here has been collected with the aim of illustrating governmental policies that historically and today shape and frame diverse forms of reproductive racism with a special focus on welfare professionals.