Since the end of World War II changing birth rates have had far-reaching consequences for social life. In every region of the world couples have been having fewer children, shrinking the basic unit of social life. Issues surrounding reproduction, once considered the most private and taboo of subjects, have become matters of intense public concern, as neo-Malthusians and environmentalists claim third-world overpopulation as a threat to the future of mankind. Cultural understandings of reproduction have also been transformed, as new technological and biomedical breakthroughs have forced us to rethink our notions of personhood and gender, family and kinship.

As students of human societies and cultures, anthropologists ought to be curious about the causes and effects of these remarkable demographic changes. Yet, until recently, matters relating to human reproduction engaged the attention of a surprisingly small number of cultural anthropologists. (This discussion excludes work in biological anthropology and paleodemography; henceforth “anthropology” is used as shorthand for the cultural branch of the field.) In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of fertility remained the province of the subfields of demographic anthropology, cultural ecology, and cultural materialism. While interest in reproduction was keen in these specialized fields, anthropology at large continued to view social life through the lens of kinship and other traditional theories of the discipline, neglecting the impact of changing human numbers on social and cultural life.