The Deployment of the Prosperous Family: Family Planning in West Java

In Indonesia, Keluarga Sejahtera or "the Prosperous Family" is a slogan for a number of government development programs which were implemented under the Soeharto regime. The centrepiece of Keluarga Sejahtera has been the family planning program. Rationalized through the arguments of the population discourses, the Indonesian family planning program has become an empirical example of Foucault's biopower where women's reproductive health is conflated with the interests of the family and the health of the nation-state's economy. Keluarga Sejahtera is an enormously ambitious project, aimed at transforming Indonesians, and specifically, fertile Indonesian women, into particular types of modern citizens. This article explores the historical and global context from which this project emerged and the impact that it has had on a local community in West Java.