Birth Control
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Outside of India, few remember Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s ne’er-do-well son. Yet as Matthew Connelly recounts in “Fatal Misconception” (Belknap Press, 544 pages, $34.95), his global history of the population control movement, Sanjay played a crucial role in one of the vilest episodes in the history of independent India, namely the sterilization of millions of Indians. In 1976, he initiated a campaign to cleanse Delhi of slums, bulldozing entire neighborhoods, most of them old and densely populated, and then had his cronies tell the displaced that they’d only be given new homes if they agreed to have vasectomies or tubectomies. The campaign spread to the countryside, where zealous officials engaged in coordinated attacks that resembled pogroms — but rather than target the members of a single ethnic group, they sterilized every poor man they could. Sterilization camps were filled to the brim with members of India’s most despised groups, namely Muslims and Hindus drawn from so-called low castes. It’s impossible to disentangle how much sterilization was straightforwardly coercive — i.e., forced at gunpoint — and how much was “incentivized” through slightly subtler threats — i.e., we will deny you the means to your livelihood.
This is the kind of behavior one would expect from a con man or a gangster, but this particular gangster had an army of civil servants and police at his beck and call. And not only Indian support: For all Sanjay’s nationalist bluster, this was a crime the country could not commit alone — a campaign this sophisticated and sweeping required expertise and investment from abroad. Sanjay’s effort to cleanse India of what one Indian official called “people pollution” was backed by powerful international nonprofits dedicated to the cause of “family planning.” The World Bank, appallingly enough, pressed India to sharply increase its sterilization efforts; after an exhaustive look at India’s comprehensive program to curb population growth, Robert McNamara, then president of the organization, essentially cheered Sanjay on.
But Mr. McNamara was not alone, or even particularly unusual in his support of forced sterilization; he was just one in a long line of Western mandarins who embraced the cause of population control. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the celebrated Swedish sociologists, embraced in the 1930s a supposedly benign version that aimed to improve the eugenic quality of the Swedish volk, and which promoted compulsory sterilization. American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, a central figure in “Fatal Misconception,” also called for sterilization aimed at combating “dysgenic qualities of body and mind” years after the Nazi death camps. To be sure, there were also figures such as UN population bureaucrat Frank Notestein, who championed modernization and female literacy as a more effective means of reducing population growth in the developing world. But the overall impression is of a population control movement defined by arrogance, and by a firm belief that the best of humanity risked being drowned out by the dregs.
“Fatal Misconception” is a detailed, dutiful history of these mandarins — who saw themselves as the responsible stewards of the global family — and tells the story of the movement’s slow but steady awakening to the central importance of women’s freedom. The unfortunate thing is that the book could have been much more. Mr. Connelly is convincing when he writes that efforts to control population have played a crucial role in modern history — decolonization, for example, was driven in part by a fear of the teeming masses of Africa and Asia, most clearly in the case of Charles de Gaulle’s retreat from Algeria; China’s coercive one-child policy has proved even more consequential — and promises what should be a bracing polemic that dissects the follies of pro-natalists and anti-natalists alike. Instead, and unfortunately, he centers his narrative on the arrogance and incompetence of a privileged slice of the nonprofit sector, only occasionally enlivened by real-world accounts of population policies gone terribly wrong. Mr. Connelly’s focus on the internal politics of institutions such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, USAID, and the UN Population Division, as well as the evolution of family planning regimes in Sweden and India, seems strangely narrow, particularly in light of the not inconsiderable number of subjects left uncovered. Though Sweden figures prominently in Mr. Connelly’s history, postwar pro-natalist efforts elsewhere in democratic Europe are given short shrift. (Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, which had the world’s most grotesque population regime, is also, distressingly, neglected.)
In the place of such worthwhile inquiry, Mr. Connelly offers a bizarre and frankly random critique of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” a report that sounded the alarm about family breakdown in America. Mr. Connelly believes that by gathering statistical evidence about black families, Moynihan had somehow led white people to see African-Americans as a “population,” and this in turn was somehow dehumanizing. This might make sense as part of a broader radical critique of “biopolitics,” or an anarchist rejection of the administrative state as a dehumanizing instrument of monopoly capital, but noting that a group subject to centuries of racial oppression faces distinctive challenges hardly merits such a harsh critique from a decidedly moderate champion of reproductive freedom.
The missed opportunities here are many. Like it or not, virtually all public policy decisions have implications for population growth, whether they are zoning laws, Social Security, public health programs, wage subsidies, civil partnerships, or the rate of incarceration. As long as governments have sweeping powers to shape the life choices of citizens, we will be a “population” subject to management. That this extraordinary power is subject to democratic oversight doesn’t mean that it won’t be abused; indeed, it means that the most intimate questions have become a matter of public disputation. Take President Bush’s well-intentioned marriage initiative, for example: Why shouldn’t a democratic government encourage marriage? After all, family breakdown increases poverty and inequality, which in turn increases the burden on taxpayers. Some form of paternalism is inevitable. If you find this logic creepy, well, it’s the logic of the democratic welfare state.
Mr. Connelly’s conclusion, billed as his reflection on “The Threat of the Future,” briefly surveys the population questions to come, most pressingly anxieties over aging and population collapse and the growing desire to create, through genetic engineering, a more perfect human race. So what will it be — do we use coercion to prevent the privatized embrace of eugenics, or do we allow free individuals to give rise to a generation of superhumans? Do we sit idly by as populations collapse, or do we encourage the reversal of anti-natalist norms? These aren’t straightforward questions, and “Fatal Misconception” fails to do them justice.
Mr. Salam is an editor at the Atlantic and the co-author of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream,” forthcoming from Doubleday.