Inventing Reproductive Rights: Sex, Population, and Feminism in Europe, 1945–1980

This lecture presents an interpretation of the emergence, following the Second World War, of the notion of ‘reproductive rights’. Drawing on critical understandings of reproductive biopower, it focuses on the ways in which the introduction and legalisation of the contraceptive pill across Western Europe in the long 1960s produced new, gendered discourses on family planning, responsibility in reproduction, sexual morality and bodily autonomy. The lecture situates France and Western Europe in the transnational developments that enabled the emergence of reproductive rights discourse following the war.