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New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth Author(S): Matthew Connelly Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol

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New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth Author(S): Matthew Connelly Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol Population Control Is History: New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth Author(s): Matthew Connelly Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 122-147 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879484 Accessed: 24/08/2009 21:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. 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Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History. http://www.jstor.org PopulationControl is History: New Perspectiveson the International Campaignto Limit PopulationGrowth MATTHEW CONNELLY Columbia University The internationalcampaign to control humanfertility has inspireda vast inter- disciplinaryliterature, but only in recent years has it become a subject for his- torical study and debate. New archives have opened, especially among the largestdonors during its early,heroic phase. And scientists and activists are in- creasingly willing to be reflexive about their lives' work. Most importantly, with rates of fertility declining in every region of the world, it is now possible to begin to see the end of the story.As the period of unprecedentedgrowth in world populationdraws to a close, internationalefforts directedat limiting that growth-as opposed to safeguardingreproductive rights and health-will in- exorably pass from the domain of policy to history.' Yet even with new sources and the perspectivethat time's passage can pro- vide, "populationcontrol" poses dauntingchallenges to historians. It touches on the history of technology and medicine, of demographyand diplomacy, of political economy and culturalformation. Dozens of governmentsalong with non-governmentaland internationalorganizations funded programs to limit populationgrowth, and their impact can only be determinedby studying how they played out in communitiesall over the world. Scholarsmust thereforecon- sider an arrayof methods, frames, and levels of analysis. "A political economy of fertility is a multi-leveled field of inquiry,"as Susan Greenhalghhas ob- served: "It combines societal structureand individual agency, both of which I amgrateful to mycolleagues at the University of Michigan'sInstitute for the Humanities and Ger- aldR. FordSchool of PublicPolicy for theiradvice and encouragement in thepreparation of this article.I alsobenefited from presentations at Harvardand Princeton Universities and the Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for Scholars,along with the suggestionsof the anonymousreviewers of CSSH. 1 This distinctionsuggests the natureand limits of the term "populationcontrol," which is itself fast becominga historicalartifact. As will be discussedanon, while it now denotesa shrinking subsetof the"family planning" agenda, population control can be seenas encompassingthe once wide-rangingefforts to shapethe qualityas well as the quantityof population.On thispoint see alsoDennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, "Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Pres- ent Alliances,"Population and DevelopmentReview 23 (1997):471. The latest U.N. projectionsare presentedin "WorldPopulation Prospects: The 2000 Revision," http://www.un.org/esa/population/ wpp2000.html. 0010-4175/XX/122-147$9.50 ? 2003 Societyfor ComparativeStudy of Societyand History 122 POPULATION CONTROL IS HISTORY 123 generally escape the demographer'sattention, and draws on both quantitative and qualitativeresearch methods and materials... The objective ... is to un- derstandhow a particularset of reproductiveinstitutions and behaviorsevolved and how its constitutiveelements relate to each other."2 This article surveys this new and expanding area of inquiry by analyzing some of the most impressive studies emergingfrom differentdisciplines. Yet it also draws attentionto how they are diverging,making Greenhalgh'sobjective appearincreasingly distant. Historically minded populationspecialists as well as historians of population policy draw on their own experiences or elite archives, almost always in the United States. They rarely connect with schol- ars writing on the microhistoryof reproduction,work that greatly complicates and enrichesour understandingof agency in populationpolicy. Yet these schol- ars, for their part,seldom ask how participants'choices might have had conse- quences beyond their own lives and communities. And whether written at the level of "worldsystems" or the individualclinic, studies all too often por- tray populationcontrol as a Cold War strategythe West foisted on the rest of the world, ignoring evidence that constituencies for interventionistpolicies emerged acrossAsia and LatinAmerica decades earlier. This essay will endeavorto show what might be gained if these differentap- proaches were broughtinto dialogue and set in an internationaland compara- tive perspective. It will describe populationcontrol as a precociously interna- tional movement that served as a platformfor an arrayof ideological projects. Episodes from its long history will help to illustratehow it can and should be seen as a key site of political contestationand cross-culturallearning, in which revolutionaryleaders used internationalconferences to articulatenew visions of North-Southrelations while "clients"treated birth control clinics as sites of negotiation and exchange. Examples such as these will demonstratehow one can use the politics of populationto probethe tensions within and between fem- inism, eugenics, environmentalism,and "development"as they interactedin a global arena,and thus illuminatethe full dimensions of a subjectthat scholars have scarcely begun to explore.3 POPULATION CONTROL FROM THE TOP DOWN Some of the earliest attemptsto put the politics of world populationgrowth in historical perspective emerged from the field of population studies, though sometimes at its margins.These are disciplinaryhistories, both in the sense that 2 SusanGreenhalgh, "Anthropology Theorizes Reproduction: Integrating Practice, Political Eco- nomic, and FeministPerspectives," in SituatingFertility: Anthropology and DemographicInquiry, ed. Susan Greenhalgh(New York:Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13. 3 While the literatureon some countriesis quite rich, especially the United States, United King- dom, and India, the focus here is on the cross-bordernetworking and cooperative activities of in- ternationalagencies, non-governmentalorganizations, foreign aid programsand the like that are often neglected in single-countryaccounts. States' efforts within their own borderswill be consid- ered to the extent that they influenced or interactedwith that broadercampaign. 124 MATTHEW CONNELLY they narratethe professionalizationand institutionalizationof theoreticaland applied researchin controlling fertility,but also in that they are concerned to uncover its hidden costs and encourage a self-questioningspirit. In one of the first such efforts,Dennis Hodgson set out to explainthe oscillationbetween "or- thodoxy" and "revisionism"in American demography,terms denoting scien- tists' greateror lesser confidence in their ability to predictand control fertility. He used the classic rubricof internaland externalfactors, giving equal weight to the demonstratedinadequacy of theory and the demandsof the political en- vironment.4By the time Hodgson wrote even a recentpresident of the Popula- tion Association of America (PAA), Paul Demeny, could be counted among the ranks of the "revisionists"in decrying how the power of the purse had driven researcherstoward the politically determinedgoal of limiting fertility.5Yet in a later article Hodgson went even further,pointing out that the PAA itself had been founded by activists as well as scientists who together were concerned about population's racial and class composition no less than its quantitative growth or decline.6 Its founding president,Henry PrattFairchild, declared in 1930 that its purposewas to "presenta united front"in preventingany narrow- er definition of populationstudies. The PAA'sfirst researchproject investigat- ed the effects of contraceptiveuse on "the fecundity of the socially inadequate classes . ."7 Chronicling the quarrelsand marriagesof convenience among anti-immi- grationactivists, scientists,eugenists, andfeminists results in "arich, but chaot- ic, history of populationthought," as Hodgson admitted.8Other studies have focused on how specific developmentsin demographyreflected both this ide- ological inheritanceand a continuallyevolving
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