Control Freaks
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
by Matthew Connelly
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008
(521 pages, $35.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Joseph A. D’Agostino
The eighth of eight children in a Catholic family, Matthew Connelly grew up in a time when the elite opinion frantically pushed population control as essential for the salvation of mankind, and he admits in Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population that he may have taken it personally.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when America’s cultural revolution was being institutionalized, “one of the few certainties of that troubled time, endorsed in virtually identical planks in the Democratic and Republican platforms of 1968, was that population control should be an urgent priority,” he writes. Even his “devout” grandmother “greeted news of each new child with dismay.”
Fatal Misconception “is a story of how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone. They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking,” writes Connelly, who teaches history at Columbia University, in a book that is surprisingly frank considering its establishment roots as the product of an Ivy League professor and Harvard University Press.
Suicidal Lows
Unlike another recent book on the subject, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, by Steven W. Mosher (with whom I once worked at the Population Research Institute), Fatal Misconception does not approach its subject from a specifically Christian perspective, but as an accessible academic history biased toward contemporary ideas of human rights.
Connelly does not ignore or justify the massive campaigns of sterilization and abortion suffered by Third World women, but he does try to present the point of view of the Western governments and experts that conceived of and funded these campaigns, as well as the more subtle ones employed to reduce Western birthrates to the suicidally low levels they have reached today.
Most population controllers believed that the rapid increase in the human population during the twentieth century presented a dire threat, one that could lead to mass starvation, wars over natural resources, epidemics caused by overcrowding and poor nutrition, and the failure of economic development programs in poor nations too fast-growing to raise average standards of living even with expanding economies. From their point of view, preventing humanity from reaching the point of unsustainability justified draconian measures—for Third World people’s own good.
In many areas, including the United States and Western Europe, successful efforts were implemented to “make children expensive,” as one population controller put it. Non-coercive methods of reducing birthrates were employed, such as ending tax breaks for families with children, encouraging women to work outside the home (leaving them less time and energy to have larger families), and promoting widespread distribution and use of contraception.
In the Third World, more vigorous measures were used, especially after the seminal revolutionary year of 1968. It was then that, according to Connelly, greater numbers of population controllers accepted the assertion that voluntary methods were not reducing global population growth.
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