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Population bombing

National Review, May 19, 2008 by Phillip Longman

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Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Matthew Connelly (Harvard, 544 pp., $35)

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.

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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 naive 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."

Population bombing

National Review, May 19, 2008 by Phillip Longman

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