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Leonard M. Lopoo will discuss "Wanting Chlldren: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America's Population." He will be joined in conversation by Ariel Kalil. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.At the Co-op.
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About the book: The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.
In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.
Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. "Wanting Children" posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.
About the author: Leonard M. Lopoo is the Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics and professor, chair, and associate dean of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, where he directs the Maxwell X Lab and serves as senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. His popular writing has appeared in the "Wall Street Journal."
About the interlocutor: Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab. She is a developmental psychologist who studies economic conditions, parenting, and child development. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Stavanger School of Business and Law and at NHH the Norwegian School of Economics. She is currently an Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families Over the Life Course. At the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab, she draws on insights from behavioral economics and neuroscience to design and experimentally test technology-based interventions to strengthen parental engagement and child skill development in low-income families.
Kalil received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Harris faculty in 1999, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center. Kalil has received the William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholars Award, the Changing Faces of America's Children Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2003 she was the first-ever recipient of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Award for Early Research Contributions. Her work has been funded by NIH, NSF, and by a number of private foundations.
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5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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