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In Fatal Misconception, his impressive chronicle of global population control, Matthew Connelly gives brief mention to demographers conducting surveys in remote locales in the mid-1960s, fishing for uniform data on sexual habits and family life, and showing little sensitivity to culture or privacy. "Did such questions," Connelly wonders, "including the responses they elicited, mean the same thing to all concerned—including the children who overheard their mother asked whether she preferred that they had never been born?" Population control carries the implication that it would be preferable for some people not to be. Whether these undesirables are defined as a Yellow Peril threatening to sink the West, hordes of the hungry ready to kill each other or you, or even just slovenly neighbors bullying your babies or absorbing welfare checks, fear of other people's children has been a powerful engine of public policy. "Population control presented itself as a charity like any other," Connelly observes, "helping less fortunate people. But it was the only one that promised to make them go away."
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Who has authority to tell another whether to have children, or how many to have? What grew into the population control movement was actually a range of separate ones, replete with strong personalities and colorful characters: shifting coalitions of birth controllers, eugenicists, neo-Malthusians, the occasional natalist, and other reformers aiming to bring economic or social development along with birth-rate reduction. Showing admirable historical empathy, Connelly makes comprehensible the views of those who endorsed radical solutions for what they saw as an emergency. Reformers worried about population and immigration in the late 19th century, and world conferences were held on the topic in the 1920s. By the early 1950s, what Connelly names a "Population establishment" coalesced in the United States with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, Planned Parenthood, and international groups, with a UN department founded to focus on population issues. Governments had to be nudged into action on population issues by these groups. Cold War tension and upheavals in the developing world helped make reduction in birth rates a priority for American foreign aid.
Many population controllers assumed that the world's masses would avoid having children if they could, so reformers simply needed provide the means to disconnect sex from fertility. Research toward cheap, effective contraception brought some strange proposals (foaming powder and a "salt rice jelly" among them), with the Pill and the IUD signaling breakthroughs in the 1960s. Distributing birth control became a major focus of population campaigns and funding: usaid's population program budget grew from $50 million in 1969 to $100 million in 1971. Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher, seeking to make people "immune" to pregnancy, touted the IUD through the 1960s, even as many women in trials were suffering complications, all too typical of the ways in which individual reproductive health was sacrificed—or disregarded—in favor of large-scale birth reductions. Sterilization, of course, offered the ultimate in birth control. In India, mobile sterilization camps were set up in the mid-1960s, performing thousands of procedures in a few weeks' time. During the drought year 1967-8, with incentives paid for submitting to the procedure, 1.8 million Indians were sterilized. At Sanjay Gandhi's initiative, India in 1975-6 saw over 8 million sterilized, with hundreds dying from botched surgeries.
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