The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America

12. Birth Control Becomes Public Policy

12 Birth Control Becomes Public Policy After World War II, two developments—one political, one scientific —radically changed the terrain of birth control. They were the campaign for population control and the development of the Pill, the first hormonal contraceptive. They mutually influenced each other: concern about overpopulation stimulated contraception research and development; the Pill was so widely publicized that it introduced knowledge of the possibility of reproduction control to many hitherto unaware of it; the two together created more legitimacy for birth control. Both stories, of population control and of the Pill, have been well covered by other writers, and I will not repeat what their excellent books and articles have discussed.1 Rather, I want to set those developments into a long-term historical perspective, to call attention to the way in which they altered the very meanings of birth control. Population Control About 1950 a new perspective—population control—came to dominate birth control organizations. Descended from Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism , population control had roots distinctly separate from previous birth control campaigns, which had emphasized sexual freedom and women’s rights. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), organizational heir to the birth control movement, united the two, and in the 1950s and 1960s 12.279-292/Gord 9/25/02, 10:45 AM 279 280 / the moral property of women the birth control “wife” was subordinated to the population control “husband.” Planned Parenthood’s earlier emphasis on family size as a factor that contributed to family prosperity and stability had foreshadowed the revived neoMalthusian emphasis on population size as central to prosperity and stability. The eugenics of earlier decades created a basis for the population control view that what was then known as third-world underdevelopment flowed from overpopulation and that birth-rate reductions could solve this and many other social evils. This union was recognized by virtually all birth control advocates . The convergence was so total that, by the 1960s, most Americans used the phrases “birth control,” “family planning,” and “population control” interchangeably .2 Here, I distinguish among these terms. “Population control” in this chapter refers, generically, to the attempt in modern history to lower birth rates on national or regional scales for the purpose of improving the standards of living of large groups. It also refers, more specifically, to the population control programs and policies advanced in the post–World War II period by the United States government, international organizations such as the United Nations, and large foundations, notably the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as later, on a national basis, by countries such as China and India. There were, of course, population control practices before this—in hunting-and-gathering societies. But not until the 1950s did population control become an important part of the foreign policy of the greatest world power. Prior to 1945 the dominant population anxiety in the United States was about underpopulation (or race suicide, in its eugenic formulation), and government did not view other countries’ population problems as demanding U.S. action. This changed as the velocity of world population growth became known: in the twentieth century, human numbers quadrupled, from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. As overpopulation anxiety spread, its leading purveyors repeated on an international scale the motifs of the eugenics sensibility , notably, the distinction between the moderate, restrained “us” and the teeming, profligate “them.” At first neo-Malthusian solutions met resistance from traditional prudery: President Eisenhower, for example, insisted as late as 1959 that population questions were an “inappropriate area” for government action.3 Nevertheless, by this time professional demographers had already persuaded private foundations that population was a problem requiring a public response, and government support followed in the 1960s. During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s academic eugenists transformed themselves into population controllers. Eugenic thinking, as we have seen, was widespread among reformers of every political persuasion since the late nineteenth century. An application of hereditarian thought to social improvement, eugenics was by no means an exclusively conservative or racist point of view. 12.279-292/Gord 9/25/02, 10:45 AM 280 Birth Control Becomes Public Policy / 281 Eugenists did not deny the importance of environmental influence and they did not consider hereditarian and environmental theories of human development to be in conflict. But in the 1890s eugenic activism took a distinctly conservative political turn, vivid in the anti-race-suicide campaign. After World War...