Books
The war against babies
Published 01 May 2008
Fatal Misconception: the Struggle to Control World Population
Matthew Connelly Harvard University Press, 544pp, £22.95
In the concluding chapter of his voluminous history of global population policy, Matthew Connelly reveals the Fatal Misconception of his title: "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." Connelly, a historian at Columbia University, is scathing about what he sees as a giant conspiracy led by rich, pale people to control the number of poor, dark people in the world. But his meticulously researched book maps a landscape of intertwined and sometimes conflicting motivations which undermine any conspiracy theory of population policy.
The chronicle begins in the late 19th century. It was about this time that the populations of Europe began to change. People moved to cities, where improvements in sanitation, nutrition and health services began to cut down death rates, especially for infants. As more children survived, women - who were in any case spending more of their time in the workforce - started having fewer children. Some believed this same process, termed the "demographic transition", would be repeated the world over. But by the early 20th century, it became clear that wasn't happening. Death rates were coming down fast, especially where colonial administrations were investing heavily in public health, but birth rates were not following of their own accord as they had in Europe. As a result, the world population was booming, and it was growing fastest in Asia.
Human agency in the form of "development" was behind the growth in population. So, presumably, humans could also redirect it. This was the thinking behind what Connelly describes as the population control movement. But did the ragtag cast of characters trying to redirect population growth really constitute a global movement? Using my own labels (Connelly is more circumspect in his language, if not his conclusions), here are some of his tale's main players:
The White Supremacists: This group believed that white people are simply better than anyone else and therefore have a right to dominate the world. They were concerned that as white countries got richer and fertility fell, they would be swamped by immigration from non-white countries. Their innate genetic advantages would not, apparently, protect them from the inevitable social collapse that would follow. Primary solution: restrict immigration from the darker countries. The United States was the first country to try this solution, excluding immigrants from China in 1882 and restricting immigration from many other nations in 1924. Other countries, led by France, thought the solution was to keep their own native numbers up by encouraging white women to breed. Contraception remained illegal in France until 1967.
The Eugenicists: They, too, believed that some people were just better than others, but they made distinctions within races as well as between them. Essentially, the richer you were, the better. The eugenicists sought to promote childbearing among the wealthy and educated, and to restrict it among the poor (often referred to as the "feeble-minded"). Given that countries in Asia and Africa were so much poorer than those of the industrialising world, their whole populations fell into the "restrict fertility" basket in discussions dominated by white men. But, paradoxically, it was Asian Singapore that took this policy to its apogee, bribing university graduates to have more children while penalising less educated parents if they had large families. The book reminds us, fascinatingly, that the idea of engineering population "quality" through selective breeding was mainstream well into the 1960s.
The Malthusians: Malthusians worried about sheer numbers, regardless of race or "quality". They warned that the carrying capacity of the planet was limited, and that even areas with low fertility might be threatened by unlimited increases in other areas. Those "other areas" were, of course, the poorer, darker countries. Their solution was to act as quickly as possible to cut down the number of births in areas where population growth was highest. Ergo, they were great supporters of modern contraceptives. By the 1970s the governments of China, India and Indonesia, three of the world's five most populous countries at the time, were firmly Malthusian.
The Moralists: Led by the Roman Catholic Church, the moralists believed that it was not man's business to mess with reproduction. Solution: ban contraception. The book provides disappointingly little discussion of the basis for these views, and does not address at all the virulent opposition to contraception from people who believe that a condom or a pill is nothing less than an invitation to extramarital sex.
The Developmentalists: They believe that not everybody wants to have lots of children and not every woman wants to be pregnant or to breastfeed for years on end. Giving people the means to go on having sex without having to breed is a good thing in its own right, they believe. It will also lead to smaller families, more investment in those children who do get born, and ultimately a better society. Developmentalists think that if you make contraceptives and other "reproductive health services" widely available, people will use them and fertility will automatically fall.
The goal of many of these groups was the same: reducing the number of births through contraception. But their very different motivations determined the target of their efforts (everyone, only poor people, only people in poor countries, and so on), as well as the zeal with which they promoted those services. The white supre macists/eugenicists/Malthusians were zealous in the extreme. They favoured contraceptive methods that were long-acting and could not easily be reversed by the user - sterilisation and IUDs topped the charts; their "acceptance" was encouraged through incentives or simply enforced. Connelly describes in excruciating detail the excesses of the coercive national campaigns to avoid births in India and China, as well as the enthusiastic backing they received from the US and international institutions. His description of harried apparatchiks funding poorly conceived projects in a desperate attempt to stake an institutional claim, while spending their burgeoning budgets, will ring all too true with readers familiar with more recently overfunded fields such as HIV prevention and bird flu.
The backlash against the coercion of the 1970s and 1980s made it impolite to talk about deliberate control of fertility. The rhetoric of the demographic transition was revived. As societies get richer and women better educated, it was again argued, fertility will drop of its own accord. In the now infamous words of Karan Singh, India's minister of health and family planning: "The best contraceptive is development."
Connelly, rightly disgusted that white men in rich countries imposed their "we know what's best for you" agenda on brown women in poor countries, appears to agree. But the development v contraceptive services debate is a false dicho tomy. Economic development increases the demand for contraception, certainly, but contraceptive services still have to be supplied. In a 544-page book on reproduction, Connelly barely mentions sex. Yet the fact is, most women as well as most men in the world would like to be able to have more sex without having to have more children. The danger of this book is that it tars all reproductive health services with the brush of coercion. In an era where conservative Christian groups are ratcheting up their opposition to contraception, that may result in women finding it harder to get access to the contraceptive services they want and need.
Elizabeth Pisani, author of "The Wisdom of Whores" (Granta), is a lapsed demographer
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