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Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
This has been a hard book to write, but the dedication really did write itself.
When I first set down to tell the story
of the population control movement, I realized that it was already a tribute to my parents. After all, I am the youngest of eight children. Just mentioning this fact strikes most people with amazement. When they hear that my parents are Catholic, they seize on it as
a simple explanation. In fact, by 1967, the year I was conceived and born, American Catholics were practicing contraception at virtually the same rate as everyone else. My grandmother, who was particularly devout, greeted news of the later arrivals with dismay. When they grew up to make her proud, her son would ask which of these grandchildren she wished had never been born—the only sharp words anyone can remember passing between them.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a tough time to raise a large family,
which may be why mine considered toughness an essential trait. It was not just the uncertainties of the era, though I well remember waiting in long lines at gas stations as the tenth passenger in a nine-passenger station wagon. We forget that one of the few certainties of that troubled time, endorsed in virtually identical planks in the Democratic and Republican platforms of 1968, was that population control should be an urgent priority. A best-seller published that year, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, insisted that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now.” On the very day I was born, the cabinet of India under Indira Gandhi considered for the first time compulsory sterilization for parents with more than three children.
And Ehrlich believed that “the birth of each American child is 50 times the disaster for the world as the birth of a child in India.”
This book is critical of Gandhi, Ehrlich, and others who argued that
only population control could save the world. Is it because, somehow, I’ve chosen to take it personally? In fact, I did not know any of this when I
started my research. I had become a historian in order to study the rise and fall of the great powers. My mentor, Paul Kennedy, had literally written the book on the subject. I became interested in the rise of world population only because Kennedy insisted that we needed to look beyond great-power rivalries to understand the new, post–Cold War era. We eventually coauthored a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly that warned that population growth in poor countries, the increasing awareness of gross economic inequality, and the prospect of mass migration might lead to clashes between “the West” and “the rest.” We called for more and better development aid, technology transfers, and additional funding for contraception—but not, Kennedy made clear, abortion. My mentor drew a moral distinction between
them. I, on the other hand, like many people who grew up in the
wake of Roe v. Wade, did not feel any particular passion about either contraception or abortion. The right to decide whether and when to have children seemed like “settled law.”
 I was therefore unsettled by what I discovered when, years later, I started researching a book on the subject, still thinking it was just a way to broaden our understanding of international security. Much to my chagrin, I found that other authors had issued similar warnings decades earlier that swelling numbers of poor people had begun to understand their plight and posed an imminent threat to themselves and others. A decade later, this stack grows ever higher. The Atlantic article was just one in a long line of works that reduce differences in wealth and power to a question of differential fertility—too often in terms of “us” and “them.”
Poor countries have long had high rates of fertility, and it has seemed
obvious that this must be part of their problem, and that having fewer children can provide a solution. In fact, this view is not supported by the data. Obviously, a society with large numbers of working people and relatively few children tends for a time to have more disposable income (until, that is, this generation tries to collect its pensions). But even the most sophisticated quantitative research cannot resolve a question that really comes down to values. Most people are quite happy to reduce their “per capita GNP” by having children, and not all of them regret it. Programs to distribute contraceptives in poor countries have not had more than a marginal effect on population growth. Far more important is whether people actually want to have smaller families. When India, China, and other countries have tried to change these preferences, whether through cash payments or outright compulsion, the results have been disastrous. We will be living with them for generations to come.
As I went from archive to archive, pored through thousands of documents, and interviewed some of the people who made this history, I began to realize that much more is at stake than how we might redefine national security. This is a story of how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone. They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking. Perhaps we would expect no less of nativists or eugenicists, who assumed that people unlike themselves must be “beaten men from beaten races.” Yet many more actually had the best of intentions, hoping to reduce poverty and prevent conflict, not unlike Kennedy and me. Of course, we did not call for coercive measures, only more contraception. But we also knew that population growth was slowing. The people I write about, on the other hand, were facing something utterly unprecedented in human history: world population was doubling and doubling again at an accelerating rate.
When contemplating the seemingly inexorable rise in human numbers,
the most thoughtful observers have eventually asked themselves: “What are people for?” One cannot read the debates that ensued without starting to take them personally, because they ultimately concern the meaning and purpose of life itself. This book will not try to settle existential questions. But a work of history can at least show what happens when some people believe they can answer on behalf of others because they think they know best. In effect, they diagnosed political problems as pathologies that had a biological basis. At its most extreme, this logic can lead to sterilization of the “unfit” or ethnic cleansing. But even family planning could be a form of population control when proponents aimed to plan other people’s families, demeaning those “targetedc as “acceptors,” including tens of millions of
poor people who were paid money to agree to sterilization. No less manipulative were those who denied hundreds of millions more people access to contraceptives and abortion because they wanted them to have more babies.
This book is about the most ambitious population control schemes of all, which aimed to remake humanity by controlling the population of the world, typically by reducing the fertility of poor people and poor countries. But all population control projects shared the premise that societies should consciously reproduce themselves by design, even if that meant controlling how people disposed of their own bodies. And all looked at human beings not as individuals but as populations that could be shaped through the combined force of faith and science. That is why nativism, eugenics, pronatalism, and coercive or manipulative forms of “family planning“ share a common history, one that can help us understand how they developed, how they diverged, and how the cause of reproductive rights was finally redeemed.
Nowadays those writing on these issues are expected to identify themselves as “pro-life“ or “pro-choice.” These two camps are locked in confrontation, espousing principles that have come to seem irreconcilable. But this is a history of how some people systematically devalued both the sanctity of life and the autonomy of the individual. Because I am late to this fight, this book reflects the passion of a convert—not to one camp or the other, but rather to the belief that we must make common cause if we are to stop what may be the even more dangerous experiments of the future. By confronting them together, the different sides might recognize in population control something that all of us should reject, and in that way find new ways to renew a dialogue about the meaning of life, and the meaning of freedom.
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