Egyptian Family Planning Commercials: Mothers Bear Children, Fathers Bear Responsibility

In January 2019 the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity released three family-planning commercials as part of its “Two Are Enough: Abu Shanab Campaign” aimed at tackling Egypt’s rapid population growth. The US-funded drive is part of a nationwide project to reduce the birthrate from 3.5 to 2.4 by 2030.¹ Rural populations, where children are seen as additional labor on farms and a source of economic strength (Michaelson 2019), are the prime target of the five-year, $19 million campaign, which stars the Egyptian actor Akram Husni in the eponymous role of Abu Shanab.

The three commercials are comically constructed to induce laughter and hilarity in the audience. The first one opens with a peasant father encouraging his (male) children, who are played by grown-up actors, to try on various items of clothing at a local store, only to inform them that he cannot afford to buy any of the things they like due to the sheer number of children he has. The second short clip, depicting Abu Shanab among a group of villagers in Upper Egypt, shows him in the process of selling a piece of land. Illiterate, he turns the contract over to his sons, none of whom can read it because he could not afford to educate so many children. In the third commercial Abu Shanab is physically threatened by a local mob while on his own because his sons, too numerous to have been well brought up, are either too busy, too lazy, too inept, or too weak to come to his rescue.

Egypt is no stranger to family-planning campaigns that reinforce stereotypes and controversial beliefs. In the 1990s the “Having too many children will wear you out and lead your husband astray” commercial warned women that too many pregnancies would lead to the loss of physical beauty. Another commercial, “A man is more than just his authority, he is a man because he takes care of his family,” focused on men to drive home the message that having fewer children is more economically viable. These commercials implied that women may bear children, but men have to raise and provide for them. The Abu Shanab campaign is notable for the virtual absence of women, the framing of child-rearing within deeply rural masculine values, and the ambivalent use of humor to emphasize these controversial value systems. It is predicated on the assumption that men should be entrusted with the decision to determine family size without much input from women, who are little more than biological receptacles for their progeny. Framing family planning from the perspective of access to education and proper standards of living— as provided exclusively by the father— assumes that women cannot be breadwinners. Representing childbearing and child-rearing as masculine experiences through the trials and tribulations of Abu Shanab’s life, therefore, has serious ramifications for female agency.

Scholarship on family planning in Egypt and the Global South has long discussed the relationship between fertility rates and gender relations. In Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves, Kamran Asdar Ali (2002) argues that beginning in the 1980s, family-planning discourses promoted the idea that Egyptian women were not “responsible enough” to use oral contraceptives properly and could not be trusted to have control over their bodies. This led to the promotion of long-term methods, such as injectables and IUDs, in the early 1990s. Egyptian men, whose only forms of contraception were condoms and vasectomies, were not targeted because of cultural politics that rendered them resistant to the use of these methods (36). Akinrinola Bankole and Susheela Singh (1998) and Rachel C. Snow, Rebecca A. Winter, and Siobán D. Harlow (2013) argue that men often want larger families in developing countries. Drawing on data reflecting declining fertility rates in the Arab world over the past thirty years, Marcia C. Inhorn (2018: 147–48) maintains that the view that male oppression is the source of “hyperfertility” is both “outdated and inaccurate.” Inhorn’s celebration of emergent masculinities as one explanation for reduced fertility rates in the...