Population Bombing

In the 20th century, a global network of colluding activists, institutions, and governments sought to engineer solutions to various real and perceived social problems by, as Matthew Connelly puts it in his new book, planning "other people's families." In its most egregious expression, this movement led to the forced sterilization of millions of people around the world, including many thousands in the U.S., on the grounds that they were -- genetically or otherwise -- unfit. California alone had sterilized 7,500 people by 1931, and the practice continued in other states up until the 1970s.

This movement also, through philanthropies and government-directed foreign aid, spent billions of dollars distributing sometimes-dangerous birth-control devices and funding abortion clinics throughout much of the developing world, even though fertility rates across the globe were already plummeting. Connelly writes: "The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves... The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the 'unfit,' or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them."

Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University and the youngest of eight children in a Catholic family, offers a new history of the population-control movement that is evenhanded and sensitive to historical context, if also naïve in its ideal of libertarianism in population matters. His chief scholarly claim is to have been the first to explore the relevant archives of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Population Council, International Planned Parenthood, the World Bank, key U.N. agencies, and other institutions deeply involved in efforts to curb world population growth. From this research, he emerges with the conclusion that while no formal, genocidal conspiracy existed, "some of the leading protagonists did, in fact, act in underhanded ways, pretending to be advancing one agenda while secretly harboring another."

Unfortunately, Connelly's heavy reliance on archival material from these institutions has led him to write a narrative that for the most part depicts the population-control movement as an endless series of international conferences -- from the sixth "International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference" in New York in 1925 to the 1994 U.N. "Cairo Conference" -- at which various factions engaged in doctrinal debate. This institutional perspective is important, but often makes for dull reading and misses the deeper psychology behind the actors in the movement. Connelly does discuss, of course, the large personalities involved, such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich. But their stories appear in fragments throughout the book and Connelly makes little effort to sum up or judge their underlying motives and character.

For example, while discussing how the Holocaust affected public opinion on population matters, Connelly mentions Sanger's view only in passing. Quoting a 1950 address to Planned Parenthood by Sanger, he lets drop that this icon of today's feminist Left "pointed to the death camps as conclusive proof of the 'widespread devaluation of human lives' and the urgent need for policies to improve them,' beginning with the sterilization of those with dysgenetic qualities of body and mind.'" Was this, truly, the meaning of the Holocaust for Sanger, and if so, what does it say about her?

Connelly does, however, get the broad outlines of the population-control movement right. It originated in the late 19th century, when Western elites began noticing their own falling fertility and the increasing population of "the unfit" (both at home and in Western colonies). Some, like Theodore Roosevelt, responded to the threat of what he and many others called "race suicide" by exhorting educated women to have more children. Later, many Western governments, including Germany and Italy under fascism, turned to, and today are returning to, pro-natalist policies, such as offering large family allowances and "baby bonuses."

But during most of the 20th century, the dominant strain of the population-control movement rejected pro-natalism and embraced a negative eugenics. In a passage Connelly does not quote, for example, Sanger wrote in 1922: "The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes." Rather than haranguing the well-to-do about their small families, Sanger argued that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism."

Into this mix of motives came two other strains of ideology, particularly as the century wore on: a libertarian strain of feminism emphasizing reproductive rights, and a Malthusian form of environmentalism. Sanger, when she wasn't talking about the need to improve "the race," justified birth control as a right of women to control their own bodies. She sometimes did this in the same sentence, as in: "Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment."

Meanwhile, as world population doubled, then doubled again in the 20th century, figures such as Paul Ehrlich justified negative eugenics (the effort to weed out "undesirable" traits) in the name of avoiding world famine and preserving the planet, including the vanishing habitats of his beloved butterflies. Responding to Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi's policy of coercing millions of her countrymen to undergo vasectomies in the Seventies, Ehrlich regretted that Western governments had not done more to facilitate the campaign. "We should have volunteered logistical support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments," Ehrlich wrote (in another comment not quoted by Connelly). "We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause."

Connelly goes easy on Ehrlich and others who share his Malthusian mindset. Indeed, he proclaims what is (to me at least) an obnoxious moral equivalence between supporters of forced sterilization and social and religious conservatives opposed to birth control and abortion. But he does score two strong points against the negative-eugenics movement that are highly relevant to how we should think about population control and the environment.

One is that fertility rates were in steep decline in both the developed and the developing world long before the introduction of modern birth-control devices. Indeed, in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, in which contraceptives were difficult to obtain, birthrates fell just as quickly as in countries that made massive efforts to suppress population growth.

Demographers now agree that human beings have long known how to control their own fertility and have done so when it made individual economic sense -- as it does now for most of the world's inhabitants. Today's global decline in birthrates results primarily from the rapid urbanization of the Third World and the increasing educational attainment of women, both of which have dramatically raised the direct and opportunity cost of children. Also at work, many demographers say, is the diffusion of individualistic, and by extension anti-natalist, values through television and other global media.

(An aside: If birthrates were plummeting around the world, why did population grow so much in the 20th century? Mostly it was because of dramatic reductions in infant mortality, especially in the developing world. But while we are still far from eliminating infant mortality, its incidence is already low enough that continuing progress on that front adds little to population. This, combined with continuing falling birthrates, particularly in developing countries, leaves global population aging rapidly and on a course toward absolute decline by as early as mid-century.)

The other important point Connelly makes is that while growth of human population is not the problem many people once thought it was, growth in the world's number of cars, air-conditioned houses, and other sources of energy demand and pollution undeniably is a challenge, and population controllers are in large part responsible. As families have grown smaller throughout most of the world, their standard of living has increased, and so too has their environmental footprint. Not only does a population of small families and childless individuals require more housing units per person, the resources freed up by low fertility typically increase per capita consumption of everything else, from beef to oil and coal. Nowhere is this truer than in the two countries where population controllers had the most influence: India and China. In India, fertility rates dropped 22 percent between 1990 and 2003 and are now below replacement levels in the southern provinces. At the same time per capita carbon-dioxide emissions increased by 50 percent as more and more Indians achieved Western living standards. Meanwhile, China, with its famous "one child" policy, saw its per capita CO₂ emissions increase by 53 percent, according to the World Bank. Each of those single-child "little emperors" who constitute the rising generation in China produces far more pollution than his peasant forebears.

Those who today point to the specter of global warming in hopes of reinvigorating the negative-eugenics movement of the last century should be careful what they wish for. The first-order effect of Zero Population Growth, let alone negative population growth, would most likely be a further increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, as individuals diverted investment in children into higher personal consumption. At the same time, the specter of global aging and population decline, particularly in the West, will undoubtedly strengthen the voices of those on the other side of the population-control debate who have long sought stricter limits on birth control and abortion. Consistent with the long history of mankind, population control is not about to go away.

Book reviewed in this article

Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 544pp., Harvard.