On the Relation between

and Family Policy Population Policy

WILLIAM PETERSEN

The Ohio State University, Columbus, U.S.A.

HOW family policy relates to population policy depends, first of all, on how one defines the two terms. Most nations try, explicitly or otherwise, to raise the level of the people's health, to cut their death rate, to control the size of cities, and so on; and in a vague way policymakers recognize that such goals are often intertwined with efforts to set the conditions of marriage, to control the incidence of divorce, to facilitate the rearing of children, and so on. Indeed, most of what a typical state does is likely to affect both the population and the family, if not as a direct consequence of policies then as a side-effect of other purposive actions. As a matter of convenience rather than of definition, the discussion in this paper is limited mainly to policies concerning family size or fertility, where the overlap between the two societal units is most evident. This is, of course, also the issue of greatest concern during the past several decades.

I

The nuclear family, obviously held together in part by its biological links, is also a policy-based social unit. The sexual urge attracts the male and the female to one another, and the mother is bound to the infant by lactation. But the relation between the father and his offspring is mainly through what Malinowski (1962) called "the principle of legitimacy", the moral rule designating one adult male (usually but not necessarily the physiological father) as responsible for each child born into the community. In all societies parenthood is licensed only in the setting that provides, as a minimum, a two- adult team to protect and socialize each infant. Thus, the nuclear family is circumscribed also by rules restricting various kinds of extramarital sex. For instance, the early evolution of Christian family norms, as Noonan (1965) demonstrated in fascinating detail, constituted a more or less conscious effort to find a middle way between the two extremes, ascetic and licentious, that typified an apocalyptic era when many believed that the world was coming to an end. The wider dissemination of more effective contraceptives has now made it possible in effect to separate sex from parenthood, with a consequent obsoles- cence of prior laws proscribing fornication, adultery, and divorce. In this less stringent moral climate, many countries have also relaxed prohibitions of homosexuality, for instance, and often even illegitimacy is regarded as less a 247 threat to the fundamental social unit than a personal misfortune that social workers should try to minimize and, if possible, disguise. Yet in virtually every society, the family is still supported in various ways. Most fundamentally, only a portion of the cost of rearing and educating children is typically borne by the parents. Service in the army, as another example of basic importance, is frequently conditioned on a man's marital status or, if he is married, on the number of his children. Family subsidies, thus, were not a total innovation when they were introduced; they differed in degree rather than in kind from such other measures. For the family has a dual nature: procreation is both a highly personal act, embodying strong emo- tions and setting off one's own children from the rest of the world, and, on the other hand, the means by which each society realizes its biological and cultural continuity. Thus, both the parents and the state have legitimate interests in the family, and many of the difficulties in establishing a j ust policy reflect these rival claims. As one example of this dilemma, how much and under what circumstances may the state abrogate the parents' control of their children? Some years ago, when a number of radiologists in the United States noticed that a sizable num- ber of child patients being examined for other reasons showed fractures of the skull or limbs, they assumed that these must have been due to accidents, for which the parents were culpable only in the sense that they had been careless. In fact, as it became clear with accumulating evidence, many of the infants and young children had been beaten or badly burnt or otherwise intentionally hurt; and in any other context the direct responsibility would have involved criminal sanctions. At first neither physicians nor social workers were willing to interfere with the parents' right to bring up their children as they saw fit, a right fully established under both common and statutory law. But after the public became aware of what was termed the "battered-child syndrome", all fifty states in rapid order passed new laws making parents more accountable for the physical abuse of their children (Kempe 1962; Gil 1970). Now American norms are in this respect closer to those of some West European countries; in all Western democ- racies the rationale behind the law is that the state shall intervene only when the parents have manifestly failed in their duty to their children. That the family remains the principal socializing agent would seem to contradict the commonplace that, as part of the great transformation ordinarily summed up as the shift from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, the family of modern industrial societies has lost many of its earlier functions. But the shift in the family, it has seldom been noted, was in the opposite direction. In the typical traditional setting, mates are selected rationally, usually by the parents of the couple, in order to assure the optimum continuation of a lineage. When the criteria of a good marriage are the two partners' genetic, familial, social, and economic characteristics, a passionate, "animalic" attachment is seen as disruptive. In the history of the world's societies romantic love has been an uncommon phenomenon, and when it appears (as in the courtly love of medi- eval Europe or its homosexual counterpart in the Levant) it is generally deemed