Sociopolitical implications of women's reproductive bodies have been subject to historical scrutiny over the decades since the second wave of feminism and since Foucault provided the notion of biopower. Yet over the last decade, additional—and exciting—scholarship has emerged that encourages historians to reappraise the significance of reproductive bodies in terms of political economy and interational diplomacy. These works have aptly characterized how cultural and political elites, including population scientists and medics specializing in human reproduction, under- stood reproduction as consisting of the problematics of its aggregate form, namely, population. They also have pointed out the transnational aspect within the politics of reproduction, precisely because the problem of population dovetails with issues that straddle national borders, such as food, land, resources, security, and migration. These works have also identified how Asia's "overpopulation" has surfaced as a contested theme in international politics during the mid-twentieth century, when demographic transition theory, implying the intricate link between high fertility and socioeconomic "underdevelopment," was being established at the dawn of the Cold War.
