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Women’s reproductive circumstances and choices have consequences for their experiences of social connectedness, inclusion and support across the life-course. Australia is a pronatalist country and women’s social identity remains strongly linked to motherhood. Yet the number of women foregoing motherhood is increasing. Despite this, women without children are perceived as failing to achieve womanhood as expected by pronatalist ideologies that assume all women are or will be mothers. Defying socially determined norms of motherhood exposes women without children to negative stereotyping and stigma, which has consequences for their social connectedness, inclusion and support. This chapter examines theories of social connectedness, inclusion and support, drawing on Australian empirical data to explore how women without children experience social connectedness, inclusion and support in a pronatalist society within their daily lives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in the context of the persistent low fertility that contributes to an ageing society, what might be the shifting roles of state and family in caring for children?

This paper aims to address this research question by drawing on the conceptual framework of “social care” (Daly and Lewis), and on data collected through a qualitative study concerning the state's population policies aimed at encouraging childbearing among citizens in Singapore.

Three themes from the interview data relate to the various dimensions of care: first, in terms of care‐as‐responsibility, interviewees consider childbearing a long‐term commitment. In this context, they perceive the current Baby Bonus scheme only as a short‐term benefit, having limited effects. Second, regarding care‐as‐costs, interviewees pointed out that some important social services are not universally affordable. In particular, they expressed a need for more state funding to put education and healthcare within the reach of the general public. Third, in terms of care‐as‐labour, care‐giving for young children by family members continues to be seen as ideal. However, there is a gap between such an ideal and the reality.

These findings suggest a greater financial and regulatory role for the state in childcare provision is increasingly vital.

As it stands, there is a mismatch of people's expectations and available policy initiatives, and this mismatch possibly undermines the success of the government's policy of encouraging childbearing.

This research complements existing studies based on content analysis of policy or statistical analysis of survey data.

In this chapter, I consider how voluntarily childless (VC) women can respond not just to master narratives of mandatory motherhood, but to their own internalised narratives of wantonness – of not desiring something they ought, or of being ambivalent about motherhood altogether. This chapter, then, is about the practices of choosing and endorsing one’s desires, however clear or ambiguous, about intentional childlessness, and in the process, of learning to hold oneself as a valued moral agent, as a dissident, but non-wanton, self. Secondarily, it is also about challenging Frankfurt’s claims that the formation and maintenance of moral identities require a kind of wholeheartedness that admits of no doubts. First, I begin with a personal story of my struggles with desiring my choices – of coming to endorse, however not-wholeheartedly, my non-wanting of motherhood, and thus rejecting the pronatalist narratives that marked my first-order desires as mistaken, and my second-order ones as deviant. Second, I offer an overview of voluntary childlessness as experienced by women most pressured to reproduce in the context of the bad moral luck of pronatalism. I note that my approach, grounded in philosophical feminist value theory, is focused on women who are not involuntarily childless or infertile, and who, because of social, economic and other privilege find themselves to be the targets of pronatalist narratives of ‘desirable’ motherhood. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the dissident practices of identity-creation through which women can embrace both their certainties and ambiguities about their VC status by offering counterstories in response to accusations of wanton-hood, or of improperly, unnaturally or heretically motivated wills.

Purpose: In the early 2010s, Japanese society recognized and experienced a panic about increasing infertility and people’s lack of knowledge about human reproduction. This chapter focuses on several graphs that misrepresented or distorted scientific findings that were used in the campaign related to this panic and explores (1) how the graphs were made, used, and authorized, and (2) how they contributed to changes in discourses and policies.

Methodology/approach: Literature survey.

Findings: (1) The graphs were made in the field of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive medicine by questionable methods, including falsifying, trimming, and misunderstanding of data. (2) Researchers in the field of fertility study relied on secondary and tertiary sources thus ignoring and compounding errors. (3) Such inauthentic research was approved and politically mobilized by professional organizations, rather than being penalized or criticized. (4) Discourse based on such unscientific knowledge may have encouraged a pronatalist policy of promoting early marriage and education about human fertility and life planning, targeted at teenage girls.

Research limitations/implications: Any society suffering from a low birthrate can experience similar phenomena. This study focuses on Japan, but it has wider implications about how low integrity and quality of the presentation of medical research can cause these issues elsewhere in the world.

Social implications: This chapter includes a warning against biological explanations that contain unscientific connotations about gender.

Originality/value of study: This study confirms how gender-related policy in 2010s Japan was influenced by science that lacked research integrity and was of sub-standard quality.

This paper aims to argue for the benefit of aligning the two policy objectives of youth inclusion and population regulation in Egypt. This alignment is mainly informed by the literature that identifies structural development issues as central to population regulation. These development issues relate to greater access to education, particularly to female youth, access to the labor market, access to family planning services and delayed age at marriage. These development issues are also at the heart of a youth‐focused policy agenda that would foster their successful transition to adulthood.

The paper provides stylized data on the situation of youth in Egypt along the youth‐ and population‐related parameters identified in the paper and surveys population policies in Egypt in view of recent changes related to the country's democratic transition.

There is great benefit in aligning the objectives of population regulation and youth integration policies in post‐January 25 Egypt. This alignment will revive the population‐focused policy agenda, which is ostensibly absent from the policy discourse, using an already vibrant discourse seeking to include youth as part of Egypt's democratic transition.

The paper contributes to the debate on youth and population issues in Egypt amid a highly volatile political scene and draws on the experience of post‐revolution Iran in terms of population policies.

Hong Kong entered an ultra-low fertility regime nearly two decades ago (Census and Statistics Department, 2013). The causes of ultra-low fertility in Hong Kong are the same as those in other developed economies (Tu and Lam, 2009). The phenomenon, in most of the western world and East Asian societies, is attributed to the incongruence between individual-oriented and family-oriented institutions (McDonald, 2000), or simply role incompatibility between work and motherhood (Stycos and Weller, 1967). One viable solution to alleviate role incompatibility is to introduce family-work reconciliation policies, including maternal and paternal leaves, subsidized child care and health care and work facilities that allow for breastfeeding (Lappegard, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to assess the family-friendly measures for enhancing fertility.

The paper analyzes the current demographic conundrum and makes recommendations.

Subsidized child care is an effective measure if it satisfies the five main criteria, namely, availability, accessibility, acceptability, cost, and quality, suggested by Rindfuss et al. (2003). Other family-friendly measures are inadequate in absolute terms and inferior to those of Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea (Ministry of Manpower, 2014; OECD, 2013). The possibility of shifting away from the ultra-low fertility regime remains doubtful, especially because low fertility is a combined effect of an increasing prevalence of single older women (Census and Statistics Department, 2014), a shift of the utility function of children toward other consumable goods (Inglehart, 1982) and a desire for achieving upward intragenerational and intergenerational social mobility (Ariès, 1980).

Since Hong Kong still subsides in the regime of the lowest-low fertility, an evaluation of the related family-friendly measures will provide constructive insights to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government how to provide incentives to citizens to consider making childbearing decisions.

Because the introduction of family-friendly measures and gender ideologies are intractably linked (Brewster and Rindfuss, 2000), Hong Kong stays in the middle of nations of families and nations of individuals, influenced by western ideas and traditional family values. It is hence worthwhile to examine the effectiveness of different family-friendly measures.

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) defines the act of travelling abroad to undergo reproductive medical treatments, including assisted reproduction technology (ART) treatments as cross-border reproductive care. The experiences of patients seeking affordable reproductive care abroad have been widely studied in the last decades (Bergman, 2011a, 2011b; Blyth, 2010; Bracewell-Milnes et al., 2016; Culley et al., 2011; Guerzoni, 2017; Hudson, 2017, 2020; Hudson & Culley, 2011; Kroløkke, 2014a, 2014b; Rodino, Goedeke, & Nowoweiski, 2014; Salama et al., 2018; Shenfield et al., 2010; Van Hoof, Pennings, & De Sutter, 2016; Whittaker, Inhorn, & Shenfield, 2019; Zanini, 2011). However, French women and couples pursuing ART treatments abroad have received little scholarly attention until now. In this chapter, we aim to address this gap in the literature with the results from an ethnographic study conducted with French women and couples who seek ART treatments in Barcelona (Spain) using data from participant observation and in-depth interviews. We begin by discussing the European reproscape, introducing French and Spanish ART legislation, to explain why a large number of citizens are excluded from the French system of reproductive governance and why they choose Spain as their destination. Then, we will discuss the obstacles faced during the reproductive journey, and the impacts of this journey on the embodiment of the treatments are explored, in order to show how French women and couples handle the physical, emotional and cultural displacements that their reproductive project entails.

This chapter addresses the differential impact of drug policy enforcement on women and the interactions of these processes with other sources of social marginalisation. It explores how broader processes of stigmatisation and exclusion play out in the context of global drug policy enforcement, limiting women’s access to effective voice and representation. The author illustrates the increasing salience of this issue through an exploration of global rightwing pushbacks and the intersectional impacts on those whose voices and identities are increasingly criminalised. The framing of women who interact with drugs or drug markets as deviant and anomalous by policy actors is constrictive of their rights, and it is crucial that reform agendas be advanced.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the issue and the reasons why fertility patterns in many industrialized and post-industrialized societies decline so rapidly, primarily in newly industrialized countries, particularly in East Asia, and especially after the countries have adopted the capitalist and market economy as the preferred approach to improve the lives of their population.

The authors discuss gender equality and the relationship between fertility and female labor force participation in industrialized and post-industrialized countries, in the context of role incompatibility, mainly for women and the level of the strength and rigidity of family- and gender-role norms/attitudes that affect the behaviors of men and women.

The existing family-related policies and programs which have reduced the role conflict and incompatibility experienced by working mothers are reviewed and discussed under national orientations toward the resolution of work–family conflict since they could affect the relevance, acceptance, significance and effectiveness of policies being developed and approved to carry on under institutional context within a nation.

Specific strategies and policies to reduce role incompatibility and childcare arrangements and their costs are discussed, especially for East Asian nations.