ABSTRACT
Promoting fertility in order to increase national population size has been central to the projects of Western national governments since the nineteenth century, and fertility schemes continue to be deployed as mechanisms that control how that population grows and what that population looks like. This chapter considers the implications of a discourse that promotes population growth through fertility, while discouraging population growth through the welcome of displaced bodies, refugees and forced migrants. Schemes that promote fertility and population growth through the market force of providing financial support to new and continuing parents are common in Western countries. The United Kingdom, unsurprisingly, has a very sound fertility assistance programme, part of the remains of its formerly embedded welfare state. Fertility schemes are, thus, absolutely central technologies of power in the production of the relationship between subjectivity and population through an understanding of population belonging that is mechanised as nationality.
