ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Broadcasting Birth Control: Promoting Family Planning in International Media

Following the Second World War, in the context of growing fears of a global population explosion the American government began to fund media campaigns in other countries to promote the idea of family planning. Communications experts and birth control advocates collaborated with colleagues around the world to develop films, cartoons, posters, radio shows, and songs selling the benefits of contraception and small families to rural communities. Despite initial confidence in the power of the media to influence behavior, paternalistic assumptions about the lack of audience sophistication and over-confidence in the power of “superior” media technologies to sway audiences unfamiliar with them led to dramatic failures. The problems led some in the field to question the vast amounts of money being devoted to media communications. Others blamed the approach, instead advocating a grassroots strategy based on local or “folk” media styles and more engagement with the target community’s own perceptions of their contraceptive needs. As American family planning promoters shifted their strategies to support, rather than supplant, indigenous media efforts, local groups began to produce their own media, experimenting with more traditional forms of communication such as puppet shows and songs in Africa as well as newer formats including the radio or television soap opera in Latin America. In this paper I explore this transition, the theories of media persuasion and ethical concerns that informed it, and the visual culture of family planning that resulted.