Population-control movement

IDENTIFICATION: International development strategy that seeks to impose limits on population growth to improve quality of life

Concerns about the negative impacts of overpopulation drive the population-control movement. The movement has advocated the worldwide spread of family-planning services, particularly the distribution of contraceptives. Cultural and religious resistance can complicate family planning efforts. Some nations have used coercive methods to impose limitations on family size.

Birth control strategies have been used to regulate the timing and spacing of births for millennia. The concept of humans limiting family size in order to improve quality of life is first credited to Thomas Malthus, an English cleric and economist who published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society in 1798. Nineteenth-century neo-Malthusians were convinced that overpopulation caused poverty and contraceptives should be provided to the poor, a position opposed by the medical community of the United States. Physicians triumphed when the Comstock Act was passed in 1873. This made the sending of contraceptives and associated information illegal through the US postal system.

Support for birth control came from a diverse constituency, including women suffragists, moral reformers, and advocates of eugenics (the science of improving human hereditary qualities). Some feminists advocated sexual abstinence rather than the use of “unnatural” contraceptives, but most believed that women should have the right to choose when to have a child. Margaret Sanger, a radical feminist and socialist, wrote extensively about birth control, set up clinics where women could seek contraceptive devices and advice, and recruited physicians. Sanger also founded the American Birth Control League in 1921—later renamed the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA)—and helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1927. At the conference, many eugenicists, including Henry F. Osborn and Frederick Osborn, called for government intervention in birth control and sterilization of the “unfit.”

In 1922 British sociologist and educator Sir Alexander M. Carr-Saunders published a book titled The Population Problem that laid the basis for “transition theory,” a description of how fertility and rates change during modernization. The evidence from European history indicated that the pattern of high fertility and mortality that preceded nutritional and health improvements was immediately followed by lowered mortality coupled to high fertility and rapid growth. Eventually, the increased costs of raising children in an industrial, market economy led to smaller families, but in the poorer regions of Africa, Asia, and South America, large families were still preferred, even after mortality declined. Discovering how to speed the process of fertility decline became an important goal of demographers, eugenicists, and many feminists, such as Sanger and her British counterpart, Marie Stopes.

Eugenicist influence on the population-control movement was evident when the BCFA targeted African American doctors for assistance in spreading the family-planning message in 1939, a policy that was labeled racist by prominent African Americans. This effort followed the founding of birth control clinics in economically depressed Puerto Rico in 1935 by the government’s relief agency. However, the Nazi atrocities during World War II tempered the more extreme positions of eugenicists, and the impoverishment of many educated and middle-class families during the Great Depression also confirmed that poverty was not necessarily a function of bad genes. Birth control information was, thus, added as part of the services provided to the poor by the US government following the New Deal, and making that information more acceptable to a wider married constituency resulted in the renaming of the BCFA, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

Generating Support

By the 1950s and 1960s, a number of wealthy businesspeople in the United States were waging a battle on behalf of birth control because of what they perceived as the evils of overpopulation. The major contributors to these efforts were the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. In 1952 John D. Rockefeller III founded and became the first president of the Population Council, an institution that aids countries in developing their own population policies by providing scientific research and grants. Hugh Moore, founder of the company that made Dixie Cups, sent his pamphlet The Population Bomb to ten thousand prominent citizens to garner support during the late 1950s, a time when most US families practiced family planning and new contraceptive technologies were being developed. The first birth control pill (Enovid) was marketed in the United States in 1965.

For advocates, obtaining the cooperation of the United States was a key objective. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the Committee to Study the US Military Assistance Program in 1958 because of complaints that US funds for overseas assistance put too much emphasis on military support at the expense of economic aid. Major General William H. Draper Jr., the former director of the European Recovery Program, chaired the committee and was encouraged by Moore to study the population problem. Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover’s Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (1958) had just been published; this work showed that having too many children overtaxed family resources, reducing private investment. That economic development might be impeded by rapid population growth provided Draper with the rationale for using international assistance for fertility limitation, but his report was later disavowed by President Eisenhower and the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States. Draper later tried to convince President John F. Kennedy to take action, but Kennedy suggested that the private sector, particularly the Ford Foundation, fund population control.

During the 1950s, a series of surveys (known as knowledge, attitudes, and practices, or KAP, surveys) measured the “unmet need” for contraception and found that most women would have smaller families if they could. Dramatic publicity about overpopulation during the early 1960s alarmed US voters. Thus, by 1965, during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the federal government began a tradition of funding population programs through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and later also through the United Nations.

United Nations

In 1962 the United Nations invited member states to formulate population policies, and in 1966 it reemphasized the connection between population and socioeconomic factors. The United Nations also reinforced individual governments’ rights in setting policy and the right of families to determine the number, timing, and spacing of births. However, Western and Asian countries, particularly India, Sweden, and the United States, pressured the United Nations to take on a leadership role in instituting family-planning programs.

In 1967 United Nations secretary-general U Thant established the UN Trust Fund for Population Activities (renamed the UN Fund for Population Activities, or UNFPA, in 1987) with the goals of helping developing nations with population-related matters, expanding the UN’s role in family planning, and pursuing new programs. He was assisted in his efforts by Reimert T. Ravenholt, head of USAID, who wanted contraceptives distributed worldwide in order to hasten economic development. By 1971 the trust fund was a recognized hub of the United Nations system, which also included support for population activities by the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the World Health Organization.

The first world conferences to study population issues were held in Rome, Italy, in 1954 and Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1965. However, the Third World Population Conference held in Bucharest, Romania, in 1974 was the first official government conference with an emphasis on policy rather than research. Delegates agreed that population issues needed to be addressed, but representatives from the Northern Hemisphere and those from the Southern Hemisphere were strongly divided over the relative importance of population planning versus economic development. Delegates from Southern countries believed that an inequitable distribution of resources and the heavy consumption patterns of wealthy Northern nations contributed as much to environmental deterioration as population growth by the poor.

Reproductive Politics

The Federal Office of Population Affairs was founded in 1970 and continues to provide federal money for family-planning services (except abortions) for poor Americans. In 1972 the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future advocated population planning as important for world stability. The commission believed that efforts should include access to abortion and limits to illegal immigration. President Richard Nixon would not approve the document, and debate intensified when the US Supreme Court prohibited interference with a woman’s right to an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy in Roe v. Wade (1973). At the 1984 Population Conference in Mexico City, the US delegation reversed its support for family-planning measures because of concerns about coercive population-control measures, such as forced abortion and involuntary sterilization in some countries, notably the People’s Republic of China. However, the World Plan of Action written at Bucharest was revised by delegates representing nations in general agreement that family-planning programs are useful whether economic development takes place or not.

Out of the 1984 conference came the Mexico City Policy, or Global Gag Rule, a US policy implemented under President Ronald Reagan that denies federal funding to nongovernmental organizations that provide or promote abortions overseas. Under this policy, the United States no longer funded the International Planned Parenthood Federation, or the UNFPA, a position that was not reversed until President Bill Clinton took office in 1993. One of President George W. Bush’s first actions after his inauguration in 2001, however, was to reinstate the policy. Yet another reversal came almost exactly eight years later under President Barack Obama, who rescinded the policy a few days after being sworn in. However, the Trump administration forced grantees out of Title X, a bipartisan program providing affordable birth control and reproductive health care, using a controversial gag rule. Fifty-three healthcare projects in thirty-two countries were affected, some losing 60 percent of their funding. President Joe Biden repealed the gag order and reinstrated Title X funding.

Abortion is a particularly contentious topic in the United States. While forced abortion and other coercive, abusive population-control measures overseas have been cited as the reason for the United States to withhold funding from international family-planning organizations, US antiabortion forces tend to oppose the voluntary termination of pregnancies as well. The antiabortion movement that arose in the United States in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was initially led by the US Catholic Church, but from the 1980s onward the movement increasingly became associated with Christian fundamentalism. The belief that life begins at conception and that abortion is therefore synonymous with murder motivates the most passionate opposition to the termination of pregnancies. Some even regard contraception as an immoral choice that defies the will of God. For these reasons, US funding of international family-planning interests is a politically charged subject. Abortion and contraception tend to be similarly controversial in countries that are predominantly Roman Catholic or Muslim. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court, which had a majority of conservative members, overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal right to abortion, leaving the legality of abortion up to individual states.

Ongoing Debates

No consensus exists on the interrelationships among population growth, environmental degradation, and economic development. Some feel population growth is a cause of poverty, while others believe the reverse. Women with the lowest education and wages and fewest opportunities outside the household tend to have the largest families. The perspective that gender inequality lies at the heart of the problem in the regions of the world that continue to exhibit high fertility has gained momentum, particularly evident at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994.

Many Southern Hemisphere nations have subsistence economies requiring labor-intensive strategies, and larger families are a rational choice where savings are difficult to put aside and children are productive assets who also provide security during old age. Children in rural India as young as six years old can look after domestic animals and younger siblings, and help with other tasks. In extended-family households, the costs of raising children are also shared because access to common lands expands as the household becomes larger. However, increasing urbanization and market pressures are forcing changes in traditional ownership of land so that these shared lands are decreasing in spite of ever-larger demands that put pressure on local environments.

Few doubt the importance of family-planning measures, and most Southern nations support and feel responsible for providing services to individual couples. However, reformers have tried to shift attention to women’s health and empowerment because the population-control approach is believed to have resulted in ethical violations and coercive abuses. Furthermore, it is not always successful where children are an important source of labor. In the twenty-first century, population control efforts have placed emphasis on women’s reproductive health, with increased sensitivity to local context. In particular, effecting societal change within communities in the developing world that practice child marriage has become a priority. Young women who receive an education, enjoy some financial independence, and marry later in life tend to be healthier, better mothers, give birth to healthier children, live less isolated lives, and be less likely to become trapped in physically abusive marriages.

As global climate change has become an existential issue for the Earth, in the 2020s the subject of population control as a potential solution is one that was often cited, but that came with controversy. Historical efforts at population control have produced negative consequences. In addition, the focus of population control is commonly focused on populations with marginal economic conditions.

As Somini Sengupta writes in The New York Times, the global population reaching 8.1 billion people in 2024 in many ways indicates progress. This shows advances in nutrition and life expectancy. Other signs of progress are demonstrated in that global human growth rates are slowing. In 2023 China, the world’s most populous nation, showed its first population decline in six decades. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an acceleration in the decline of the US birth rate, one that was already underway. Sengupta also demonstrates larger populations do not necessarily have to result in larger amounts of pollution that are produced. In 2030, India is projected to have four times the population of the United States but only to produce one-fifth of the carbon emissions.

Bibliography

Brown, Lester R., Gary Gardner, and Brian Halweil. Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge. Sterling, Va.: Earthscan, 2000.

Eager, Paige Whaley. Global Population Policy: From Population Control to Reproductive Rights. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.

Harkavy, Oscar. Curbing Population Growth: An Insider’s Perspective on the Population Movement. New York: Plenum Press, 1995.

Hartmann, Betsy. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Boston: South End Press, 1995.

Huggins, Laura E., and Hanna Skandera, eds. Population Puzzle: Boom or Bust? Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2004.

Sengupta, Somini. “The Population Question.” The New York Times, 18 Nov. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/climate/the-population-question. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Tobin, Kathleen A. Politics and Population Control: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Walsh, Bryan. “The Great Population Growth Slowdown.”Vox, 5 Jan. 2022, www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/1/5/22867184/us-census-population-growth-slowdown-migration-birth-death. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Zimmerman, Linnea, and Travis Rieder. “Is Population Control a Climate Change Solution?” Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health, 26 Oct. 2022, magazine.jhsph.edu/2022/population-control-climate-change-solution. Accessed 22 July 2024.