Family, Gender, and Population in the Middle East Policies in Context by Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, editor. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1995, 257 pp.

Abstract

Obermeyer has edited a volume of essays originally delivered at an international
symposium, “Family, Gender, and Population Policy: International
Debates and Middle Eastern Realities,” held in Cairo in early 1994. Organized
by the Population Council, the symposium invited scholars to evaluate contemporary
issues of population planning in light of current economic, political, cultural,
and demographic forces influencing the region. Hoping to assist the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), the
Population Council asked scholars from various disciplines to bring together
empirical research and theoretical analysis in order to facilitate and inform the
discussion that would follow at the ICPD.
The results of this research and discussion proved to be of great value to the
participants at the ICPD and subsequently the contributors framed their findings
in the essays that form the chapters of this volume. Of the seventeen contributors,
thirteen work in Middle Eastern countries; three reside in North
America and one in Europe, but they have close ties to the Middle East by virtue
of family background or extensive study. Their disciplines include economics,
demography, and sociology, as well as epidemiology, biostatistics, obstetrics,
and gynecology. An associate professor of anthropology and population in the
Department of Population and International Health at Harvard University, Carla
Makhlouf Obermeyer, as editor, brings these varied disciplines together within
an integrated framework provided by her own interdisciplinary work.
In the Foreword by Carolyn Makinson, program officer of the Andrew
Mellon Foundation, the significant contribution made by these researchers is
underscored as she places these essays within the larger context of the ICPD
The papers in this book go to press in a climate very different from the one prevailing
when they were solicited and presented [i.e. before the ICPD]. Now, the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) is behind us. Its
Programme of Action-which calls for population policies to address social development
beyond family planning, and for family planning to be placed in a broader
reproductive health framework-met with approval from widely differing constituencies
in the population and development fields, and was adopted by the official
delegations of 179 states. . . . Two years ago, such a consensus seemed improbable..
. (p. xi)
As well as contributing substantive data to inform policy-making discussions,
the writers offer current research that challenges the more superficial discussions
of population planning issues which are based on stereotypic understandings
of the diverse cultural and religious differences among the various countries
and regions of the Middle East. Several major themes emerge: the need to
understand family planning within the larger context of women’s health services,
“the need to better define and measure widely used but little understood
concepts such as women’s status and autonomy” (p. xii), and the need to examine
“women’s rights” within the context of traditional Islam as it is practiced in
specific cultural and geographic areas.
Organized under three broad categories: “The Family, the State, and the Law:
Politics and Population”; “Women in Families: Cultural Constraints and ...