Fertility and Family Well-being Effects of an Aggressive Family Planning Policy in Peru in the 1990s

In the mid-1990s President Fujimori of Peru initiated an aggressive family planning program to address widespread poverty in the country. Female sterilization was a publicly stated element of the program, but anecdotal evidence suggests that health workers were given large sterilization quotas and reportedly used bribes, coercion, and even force to meet them. While the exact details of the program were not public, the Peruvian Demographic and Health Surveys provide evidence of a large increase in sterilizations during the suspected policy window. In this paper we will address three research questions: First, who was affected by the Fujimori sterilization policy? Second, what was impact of the policy on fertility? Third, what, if any, impact did the policy have on household well-being? We tackle these questions sequentially, with each stage feeding into the next. We carefully outline the challenges and assumptions behind causal identification at each stage.