Seeing Beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and the Problem of Sovereignty

In December 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower called a meeting of his National Security Council (NSC) to discuss foreign aid. He said that they had neglected what he viewed as the looming threat of the future:

In all our discussions of the problem of underdeveloped countries and the kind of assistance which we could effectively provide them, we had not faced up to what was really the most serious problem, namely, that of exploding population growths. As far as he could see, continued the President, the only solution to this problem throughout the world was finding an effective two cent contraceptive.

Eisenhower thought that 'something drastic had to be done to solve this problem', though 'he certainly did not know how to get started on this solution and he furthermore could not himself get it started'.¹

Eisenhower called for new ideas. He had already asked one of the men present, General William Draper, to lead a presidential commission on US foreign aid. Draper eventually managed to persuade the other members, including influential figures such as Joseph M. Dodge, General Al Gruenther and John J. McCloy, that the United States should help poor countries reduce fertility rates.² The problem continued to preoccupy the President. In another NSC meeting, he confided that it was 'a constant worry to him and from time to time reduced him to despair'.³ But when a reporter asked him if he agreed that the United States should supply contraceptives, Eisenhower rejected the very idea: 'I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility'.⁴ It was only after leaving office that he backed population control, agreeing to serve as honorary co-chairman, with Harry Truman, of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. He complained that, with the proliferating array of welfare programmes, including the beginning of federally funded birth control, the United States was 'spending money with one hand to slow up population growth among responsible families and with the other providing financial incentives for increasing production by the ignorant, feeble-minded or lazy'.⁵

For many scholars Eisenhower's position would appear anomalous, and not just because of his seemingly anachronistic support for eugenics. To them, 'biopolitics' was not just a proper activity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments. Efforts to shape the quantity, 'quality' and mobility of populations constitute the quintessential state-building project. These scholars have offered so many reasons for the coming of population control that it has begun to appear overdetermined. With the proliferation of mass conscription systems, comparing national birth rates offered a means to predict the future correlation of forces.⁶ The increasing responsibilities of states in social welfare — taking on and further expanding functions once fulfilled by municipalities and charities — created incentives to institutionalize citizenship, register aliens and expel those considered a public charge or public danger. This process accelerated up to the close of the nineteenth century, as the number of poor migrants increased, together with concerns about crime and contagion.⁷ The collection of population statistics is said to have become so obsessive as to constitute a 'totalitarian menace', especially with the growing influence of eugenics in the early twentieth century.⁸ This trend is thought to have encompassed the imperial possessions of European powers, as censuses and other statistical projects loomed large in 'the colonial imagination'.⁹ Much of this work has been inspired by Michel Foucault's insight that the concept of population, with measurable properties amenable to intervention, created a field of contention, though one in which states gradually assumed responsibility for governing both the social body and the individual bodies of subjects.¹⁰

Yet if scholars have shown that states had compelling reasons to control populations, they have not explained why state officials were so slow to recognize and act on them. Prosecutors and judges in the United States and Europe were generally reluctant to enforce laws against birth control and abortion.¹¹ Population control measures were typically urged on states from the outside, at least initially. In...