Family planning interventions formed the bulwark of health communication, emerged through the agenda of development communication, and played a formative role in the constitution of communication as a discipline. Initially articulated within the ambit of population control, interventions were driven by the goal of reducing the burgeoning population growth in the global south in the postcolonial context of newly emerging nation states. Communication therefore was conceived as a solution to the problem of uncontrolled population growth and the development of persuasive communication messages as the way to achieve behavior change in the target population.

The growing populations in the global south and among the poor in the global north were seen as threats to global geosecurity. The agenda of population control therefore was constituted within the ...