In fact the close of the nineteenth century, regulating migration was conceived as a means to maintain both the fertility of European settlers and the mortality of Asian "hordes." When birth rates continued to fall among the European peoples in the first decades of the twentieth century-at the same time fears of degeneration became pervasive-increasing the size and "quality" of nations provided both the rationale and the human resources to renew colonial expansion. But in the 1930s and 1940s imperial authorities began to realize that population growth was accelerating in North Africa, Korea, India, Indochina, and the West and East Indies. Only the Nazis made it a matter of policy to systematically attack the fertility of conquered peoples, at the same time applying colonial practices like wholesale expropriation, forced labor, and exemplary terror in the heart of Europe. The reaction this provoked reinforced the reluctance of other imperial powers to risk measures to reduce the growth of subject populations. This was true even when there was local support for promoting contraception. In India under the Raj, and in occupied Japan, local elites recognized in population control a means to regenerate nations and reclaim their independence.

This was the historical conjuncture that gave birth to the movement that sought to plan "the global family." Family planning was expected to eliminate differential fertility between rich and poor both within nations and around the world. Former colonial officials staffed new international and nongovernmental organizations and, together with leaders of newly independent states, devised ways to reproduce nations according to plan. Mter a few false stans in the 1940s, and the consolidation of a population establishment in the 1950s, a transnational network began to organize massive social engineering experiments. As Gunnar Myrdal remarked at the time, UN agencies had inherited the mantle of the mission civilisatrice. Poor countries were pressed to accept population programs and rich countries were expected to pay for them. A majority finally agreed to create a United Nations Fund for Population Activities. Lobbyists and UN officials worked behind the scenes to shield it from government oversight or at least ensure that it could funnel money to NGOs, which operated even more independently. When some states openly accused proponents of neocolonialism, powerful aid agencies like USAID and the World Bank convinced them to reconsider.

In recent years, as the institution of sovereignty has seemed increasingly shaky, observers have focused on the fate of "failed states" like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Mghanistan. International and nongovernmental organizations exercise stewardship on behalf of the "international community," creating a kind of "Empire Lite," albeit with the best of intentions. The population control movement demonstrated decades ago that "global governance" can work not JUSt in war-torn territories, but domains into which few colonial officers would ever have dared enter. What Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the power to regulate both individual and social bodies, presented infinite opportunities to substitute "governmentality" for state sovereignty. Preaching rules that regulated how people reproduce nations was far more subversive of sovereignty than restoring a state's capacity to control its own territory. Proponents were trying to remake humanity to fit global norms.

The world is now full of transnational movements responding to a range of different "crises," including epidemic disease, refugee flows, and climate change. Many see global governance as the hope of the future. It appears to be a welcome alternative to the sovereign state at a time in which the most important problems cannot be contained by national borders. But it is worth recalling how many of those who sought to control the population of the world also dreamed of world peace, world government, or at least a closer union of like-minded peoples. The longtime leader of the Malthusian League, Charles Drysdale, did not just want to fine overly prolific parents, he wanted a federation to unite Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Corrado Gini called for a Euro-American union, if only because he was concerned about how miscegenation was making the two sides of the Atlantic drift apart. Harry Laughlin drafted and redrafted schemes for an international parliament in which the best stocks could rule the earth. Julian Huxley and his fellow "reform eugenicists" fought against this kind of racial prejudice, but they too wanted a "federation of the whole world" to undertake a comprehensive program of genetic improvement. And the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church has always claimed to represent all God's people both in this world and the next.

Why should we presume that would-be governors of the globe will be essentially different from other kinds of governors? And why should we expect that politics will improve merely by pouring it into different containers, especially when these new vessels also divide people and keep them unequal? The nation-state, for all its faults, at least provides a structure in which governors and the governed are presumed to belong to the same polity. This has not precluded terrible atrocities, the worst typically inflicted on stateless people after they have been stripped of their citizenship. International and nongovernmental organizations can provide aid, but if they are to offer a better alternative, they must surmount a critical flaw: a constitutional inability to answer to the people they profess to serve.

Perhaps this problem can be overcome. But recent experience, such as the global campaign against HIV/AIDS, is not encouraging. For all the talk of "lessons learned," in some cases by the very same institutions that managed population control campaigns, they have been making many of the same mistakes. Once again, declaring a "crisis," even a national security threat, appeared necessary to attract media attention, scientific research, and humanitarian aid. Exponential growth in earmarked funds added to the pressure for "crash programs." Staff were hired away from already struggling health programs to work on this single problem. Standardized approaches to the "global AIDS crisis" override merely local concerns. After all, HIV like "overpopulation," threatens everyone, including people in Geneva and New York, whereas "there are no anti-dysentery activists."

Maybe it is commendable to feel a sense of urgency about helping people with AIDS, or an oppressive government, or an unwanted pregnancy. Perhaps declaring a global crisis once again really can "make poverty history." But the problems begin when those with money and power view "dialogue" as just a way to tell other people what is good for them. As much as they may scoff at the charge, the spirit of empire lives on when people are unaccountable to those they claim to serve. All that historians can do is remind them of where all this can lead. Little good can come from schemes to improve the human condition that start with such an impoverished sense of the past.

It might appear that the history of population control, at least, is over. Certainly the global movement to shape demographic trends now lies dormant. Allover the world there has been a shift in the locus of control in how societies reproduce themselves, whether locally, nationally, or globally. Individuals are deciding for themselves, with or without anyone's help or permission. They are insisting on their right to choose where they live, and an ever-growing number are managing to get their way-nearly two hundred million having emigrated to another country, according to UN estimates. They are also choosing how many children they will have, and even what kind of children they will be.

This trend may seem to be leading to the ultimate realization of reproductive rights. Bur in a world in which some own private jets while asylumseekers are imprisoned, we must not be sanguine. Many parents already realize, for instance, that their choices between work and family, however difficult, would be impossible without the aid of poor women who have no choice but to leave their own families behind. Other women still cannot get contraception ot use it without fear of violence. Abortion is the last line in women's defense of their bodily autonomy, and the attacks never cease. But in Asia, sex selection is making women a minority, subject to child marriage and sexual violence. In all these ways, we live with the legacies of policies and programs to shape populations, even if we are not ourselves living examples of "family planning."

Some have declared a new population crisis, only this time it is because the projections seem too low rather than too high, and we are told that we should fear too many elderly rather than too many children. Now most pronounced in Europe and Japan, the "aging" of populations may proceed much more rapidly in countries where fertility fell the fastest, such as China and Mexico, this time without benefit of a social safety net. Worldwide, in vitro fertilization and international adoption are increasingly in demand. For those who have put off childbearing and struggle to conceive, they can seem like miracles. But medical technology and the economics of the "baby business" have also brought us preimplantation genetic diagnosis, the outsourcing of surrogacy, and a global market for sperm, eggs, embryos, and infants. If privileged people are permitted to pick and choose, and make themselves a breed apart, how can future generations possibly fight prejudice or promote more equal opportunities?
 

Population Control or Birth Control?

Whith population activists and scientists the world over arrayed in hostile camps in 1930, four different international conferences had convened to claim leadership in what they  proclaimed as the gathering of a peaceful movement to shape the demographic destiny of all humankind. The first, organized in Zurich by Margaret  Sanger, was limited to discussions about contraceptive technique among doctors and clinicians. "All theories, all propaganda, all moral and ethical aspects of the subject," Sanger explained, "were left in abeyancepractically forgotten-in the unanimity of cool scientific conviction that today contraception as an instrument in racial progress is on the way to be reliable and efficient and may in the very near future be perfected."l

 Sanger's conference was sharply divided over the very definition of birth control-specifically, over whether birth control included abortion. A week later a congress of the World League for Sex Reform convened in Vienna to take on a broader, and braver, agenda. Even though rougWy a thousand came to Vienna-ten times as many as were in Zurich-they managed to agree on a common set of policies, including birth control, sex education, and "the liberation of marriage (and especially divorce) from the present Church and State tyranny." They called homosexuality abnormal, but not sinful, and insisted that "sexual acts between responsible adults, undertaken by mutual consent, [were] to be regarded as the private concern of those adults." But Sanger was not there, having withdrawn for fear that the cause of reforming sexual mores would discredit her efforts to bring birth control into the mainstream.2

Sanger's scientific conviction that racial progress through birth control would soon be perfected was not shared by scientists themselves. By this point, nearly all the leading geneticists had disowned eugenics as a practical program. Raymond Pearl had described a field in disarray in his parting address as president of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems at its London assembly in June 1931: "It requires no expert to perceive that the growing hordes of people on the face of the earth are constantly and increasingly adding to the economic and social difficulties of an already sufficiently harassed world." But while for some the falling rates of fertility in Europe and the United States promised greater prosperity, others saw "a danger to Western civilization in an inevitable struggle with teeming yellow and black populations."3

Corrado Gini allowed for no doubts when he opened a World Population Congress in Rome three months later in defiance of the Union's governing council. "For too long," he declared, "students of population problems have based their discussions on Malthusian premises." Many more eugenicists assembled before him, such as Herman Muckermann of Germany and Lucien March of France, were equally convinced that population "quality" depended above all on maintaining quantitative growth. With the backing of Mussolini himself as honorary president, Gini persuaded the Congress to adopt a resolution warning all the advanced nations that they were facing decline.4

Over the following decade several attempts were made to reconcile competing activist groups and professional associations. Cooperation seemed all the more imperative as fertility decline now affected "all of modern civilization," as Fernand Boverat declared in the Salone Giulio Cesare at the Rome Congress, "as much in Moscow as in Tokyo." This inspired an outpouring of books with such titles as The TwiLight of Parenthood, Ie Destin des Races Blanches, and Sterben die weissen Volker. Some leading researchers still assumed, based on the European experience, that population growth was slowing worldwide. But during the 1930s all the most important imperial possessions, including Egypt, India, Indochina, Korea, North Mrica, the Philippines, and Java-the core of the Dutch East Indies-reported steady and sometimes rapid growth. Even Gini's conference, intended as a concerted attack on Malthusianism, heard a Japanese official endorse birth control because Korea and Formosa were already too crowded to permit further settlement. The chief of statistics in the Dutch East Indies agreed, voicing an argument that would soon be heard across the colonial world: "For decades to come the problem of native prosperity in Java will mean the problem of]avas demography."5

Nevertheless, negotiations to forge an alliance of population scientists and activists repeatedly failed. Indeed, these efforts are all but invisible alongside the genocidal programs of the period. One of the hallmarks of the more extreme population politics was a common rhetoric that construed political problems as biological problems and human history as natural history. Class, ethnic, or racial enemies were rendered as existential threats, variously semihuman, subhuman, vermin, or worse, requiring a purge of the body politic. Women who failed in their duty to produce healthy workers, soldiers, and settlers were also targeted, as the pro-natalist policies of France and Italy spread across Europe and beyond. The home front of the coming world war witnessed hostilities-and casualties-even before armies clashed, as belligerent nations drafted women to fight their "demographic battles."6

A week after the conclusion of the Rome congress, the Japanese Army inaugurated this new era when it invaded Manchuria. Propagandists argued that settling its supposedly open spaces would purifY a rural society grown diseased and restive because of overpopulation. During the long struggle with China, commentators on both sides portrayed it as a war of populations. By the end, the imperial Japanese government had not only imprisoned birth control advocates and abortion providers, but also set demographic targets to make a purified "Yamato race" overlords of Asia, including the overseas settlement of twelve million people.7

Fascist Italy had already adopted some of the harshest penalties for any practice that interfered with people's social duty to contribute to the national "stock." Squadrons of destroyers escorted convoys of settlers to dramatize the need for colonies in Libya and beyond. Mussolini demanded figures on births and deaths month by month, province by province, pressing Gini for explanations when they did not add up. Excited when Italy's population appeared to be overtaking that of Britain and France, he grew dispirited when Italy started to fall farther behind the USSR and Germany. Gini was finally removed from his post when he suggested that 11 Duce's "demographic battle" was unwinnable.8

Soviet officials also tracked fertility and mortality closely, and therefore knew that, rather than prevailing in the struggle over population, collectivization and the ensuing famine had brought an astonishingly rapid decline in births and ten times as many deaths in some districts of the Ukraine. After 1936, they withdrew contraceptives from the market, made abortion illegal, and offered mothers cash incentives to bear large families. More prosperous peasants continued to be described as "anti-Soviet elements" who required "extraction" in order to "cleanse" the workers' paradise. By the end of the decade deportations increasingly targeted whole ethnic groups for the unacknowledged purpose of consolidating control over border regions.9

Even in this appalling era, Nazi population control stood out, and not just because of its single-minded pursuit of the Jews. Before Hitler came to power, popular and professional movements-many considered progressive-had pushed for pro-natalism, improved public health, eugenics, and sex reform. The Nazis plundered them for ideas and put them all in the service of racial purity and anti-Semitism. In part because of the equally fractious nature of Hitler's state, contending groups were empowered to implement increasingly radical measures, including eugenic matchmaking to breed a new generarion of colonists, massive sterilization programs of the unfit, and secret medical killing of the disabled. Hitler would explain the conquest, depopulation, and resettlement of Eastern Europe as "the planned control of population movements" to restore the numbers and quality of the Aryan race.1O

If the Nazi program was unparalleled, the idea that the state had an interest in ensuring a racially sound citizenry cut across the political spectrum and circled the world. While never approaching the pace set by Nazi Germany, programs to sterilize people in and out of institutions-whether for "feeblemindedness" or just antisocial behavior-accelerated across the United States. At the same time, eugenic sterilization laws were passed in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden with hardly a word of protest. This trend was apparent even in those areas where the more "positive" version of eugenics had once prevailed. In the late 1930s Mexico experimented with eugenic sterilization, Brazil adopted racial quotas in its immigration law, and both countries together with Argentina passed prenuptial laws intended to prevent marriage among the unfit. There was a similar hardening of attitudes and proposals for harsher measures in France, targeting both prospective immigrants and citizens who interfered with the state's biological goals. The Vichy regime sentenced some women to a lifetime of hard labor or the guillotine for abortion, at the same time pressuring working women to stay home and raise more children.11

While such moves were polarizing, they also encouraged those with more positive visions of population control to find common ground and make themselves heard. Birth controllers, pro-natalists, and eugenicists in democratic countries strived to devise a common platform that could win popular support. Among the most promising approaches was to make contraception part of a broader program to help parents raise healthy children. Promoting maternal and infant health also rallied some of the most influential proponents of the welfare state, including Gunnar and Alva Myrdal and Sir William Beveridge. All shared a concern for both the quantity and the quality of population along with an aversion for the antidemocratic and pseudoscientific measures imposed by dietators.12

The lengthy negotiations among population activists and organizations did not achieve unanimity, but they did lay the ideological foundations of a postwar movement for "family planning." The phrase first emerged in this period, and was meant to represent fertility regulation as both "family friendly" and essential to social planning. Even the Vatican came to accept a version of family planning, albeit under the same conditions: individuals could not plan their families without professional guidance to guarantee the greater good.13

Birth controllers and eugenicists also pursued practical experiments in international coordination and assistance. Activists from Europe and the United States conducted publicity tours across Asia, and dozens of clinics and contraception information centers were founded in India and China. While the Great Depression drastically increased the difficulty of organizing international meetings, the new Birth Control International Information Center (BCIIC) in London brought activists around the world into closer contact than ever before. By sharing experiences, they became all the more aware of the need to develop inexpensive, reliable, and easy-to-use contraceptives, and this period also witnessed the beginning of international research and field trials. No less important, it also saw the first foundation-backed studies of the use and effectiveness of existing methods. Some of the organizations that pioneered these efforts-such as the BCIIC and the Birth Control Investigation Committee-did not survive the war, but their failures as much as their successes prepared the way for the international campaigns of the 1950s and 196Os.

The aftermath of World War II would parallel the period following World War I, in that both witnessed ambitious designs for truly global population programs under the auspices of new international organizations, once again culminating in a clash with the Catholic Church. But these intervening years, marked by doubt and pessimism, were no less important in the practical and ideological development of population control as an international movement. Reduced resources forced birth controllers and more liberal eugenicists to rein in their ambitions and focus on experimentation and organizational work. And a more hostile political environment, including a growing reaction against both Malthusianism and racism, compelled them to consider the common interests-or at least common enemiesthat could unite them in a long-term campaign that would eventually span the globe.

Shaping every discussion of population problems throughout the 1930s was a preoccupation with the international economic crisis. As it intensified and spread with the financial panics of 1931, and millions of unemployed parents struggled to feed their families, it began to appear ludicrous to deny them the means to prevent unwanted births. Birth control was one of the few American industries to prosper, serving a $250 million market by 1938. Not only was there growing acceptance of contraception in many countries, there was increasingly an expectation that parents should have no more children than they could manage. For instance, that same year a Gallup poll found that 76 percent of American women thought that family income was the most important consideration in reproductive decisions, and almost 80 percent favored the use of contraceptives. With the state assuming unprecedented importance in providing for people's everyday needs even in liberal democracies, it became less shocking to assert that it also had a role in helping them to regulate their reproduction.14

Yet it was not at all clear what that role would be, and whether states could or should further reduce birth rates by making contraceptives more widely available. Using new-but faulty-techniques to project population trends, demographers had begun to forecast absolute declines within the decade for France, Britain, and Germany. In 1933, U.S. fertility fell below the estimated replacement level for the first time in history. No less disturbing, international labor migtation not only had come to a halt, but had shifted into reverse. In 1931 more Europeans returned from the United States than emigrated there, and that same year some two hundred thousand disappointed workers also left France. Eminent authorities, including John Maynard Keynes and Louis Dublin, suggested that the state might have an interest in stimulating the reproduction of workers and consumers, just as it was attempting to jump-start economic production and consumption.15

Population scientists and activists also disagreed about how to influence policy. Even among those committed to widening access to contraceptives, there were bitter personal and organizational disputes-especially in Britain and the United States. These two countries had the largest and richest constituencies for birth control, especially after their counterparts in France, Germany, and Japan were silenced. But Sanger had resigned from the ABCL in 1928 when she found she could no longer control it. The dispute began to play out across the pages of the Birth Control Review, which Sanger now derided as no different from "all the little Catholic papers." Her long-running feud with Marie Stopes also continued unabated, as both competed to win the favor of eugenicists. 16

At the end of 1930 Sanger tried once again to create an organization to encompass all those concerned with population trends, raising the necessary money from the Milbank Memorial Fund. And once more she allowed someone else to take the credit: the sociologist and anti-immigration activist Henry Pratt Fairchild. Fairchild invited a dozen of the most prominent birth controllers, eugenicists, and population researchers to his office at New York University; these included Laughlin, Dublin, and ABCL president Eleanor Jones. Now that the time had come when population could be "rationally manipulated," he called for an association "to present a united front to students and the world at large." The Milbank representative, John Kingsbury, was emphatically in favor of more activism, proposing as its name the "National Association for the Scientific Study and Control of Population." They opted for a more neutral moniker, the Population Association of America. No one disagreed with the idea that the PAA should study eugenics. Its very first research project investigated the fertility of "the socially inadequate classes." But advocating birth control was still too controversial. Fairchild pointed out that the association would receive all kinds of inquiries. "Shall we reply, 'We have been studying these problems for ten years and have nothing to say'? 'Yes, yes,' came from allover the room."I7

Just as in Geneva, Sanger was persuaded to recede into the background. The organizers created a governing body limited to scientists, the College of Fellows. And as a further safeguard, Dublin continued to lead the American National Committee of the IUSIPP as an independent entity. The leadership of these organizations was virtually identical, and they went to great lengths "to keep out all but the purest of the academically pure," as one participant, Frank Notestein, later recalled.18

Once again, disappointment in effecting change in the United States led Sanger to redirect her efforts abroad. Thanks to Edith How-Martyn's tight management of the Geneva conference, there had been enough money left over to launch the Birth Control Information Center in London, with Sanger as its president. In 1930, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops accepted the practice of contraception within marriage when there was "a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood." The Center was encouraged to canvass members of Parliament as part of a successful campaign to secure government authorization for the distriburion of birth control at health centers. After the Zurich conference, it was rechristened as the Birth Control International Information Centre (BClIC). London was the seat of the largest empire, with local clinics now available for training doctors from around the world. It was ideally situated to become headquarters of a birth control movement with global aspirations.19

The defection of the Anglican bishops together with the spread of contraception and marriage restrictions even in the most Catholic countries finally provoked a public response from Rome. On New Year's Eve 1930, Pius XI declared that marriage was divinely instituted, not only to ensure that the number of worshippers "should daily increase," but also to encourage the "blending oflife as a whole," aiming at the mutual improvement of husband and wife. This may have been an oblique response to governments inclined to keep apart those judged unfit for parenthood. But Casti Connubii was above all an uncompromising defense of patriarchy as well as the pope's authority-as Vicar of Christ-to act as father to believers everywhere: "The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman." As the "heart" of the marriage, "the chief in love," the wife deserved her dignity. But this required "the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience." The pope insisted that states had no right to deny marriage to their citizens or sterilize them, any more than people had a right to sterilize themselves.20

The Church hierarchy closed ranks behind Casti Connubii. Bishops disciplined dissenters and instructed organizations of lay men and women to help defend the faith. A crucial test came early with the sterilization campaign launched in Germany in 1932. The Vatican bitterly protested, especially when Catholic institutions and personnel were required to participate. Together with threats to the independence of its schools, newspapers, and youth organizations, Vatican secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli-later Pope Pius XII-condemned it as an extreme form of the hypernationalism that everywhere imperiled the Holy See's "supernational mission." But this mission did not include protecting Jewish communities. Pacelli offered hardly a word of protest about the mounting threat to their survival. The Vatican's official newspaper, Osservatore Romano, at other times condemned eugenics as an "aberrational type of internationalism," and suggested that Nazi racism, like birth control, was really a manifestation of the global problem of infertility.21

Instead of focusing on murderous regimes, or even eugenic sterilization, the Vatican fought with equal fervor any attempt to legalize contraception-indeed, any legislation that "does not give to heads of family the place that normally belongs to them!"-as the Vatican's secretary for extraordinary ecclesiastical affairs, Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, put it. National hierarchies in Europe cheered pro-natalist policies, including harsh penalties for violators. At the same time, lay organizations dedicated to promoting the Christian family proliferated, coming together for the first time in an international congress in Paris as part of the Universal Exposition of 1937. In the United States as well, the bishops' fight against "modern paganism" and the "menacing decline in the birth rate" reached a fever pitch.22

By this point, Malthusians and eugenicists also had a quasi-religious faith in the possibility of a worldwide population control crusade. As the Malthusian League's official organ, The New Generation, put it: "The next great task for birth controllers is to convert the backward countries of the world-China, India, and Japan and the coloured peoples of Africa and South America." Lord Horder, private physician to the Prince of Wales, endorsed its work as "missionary ... making known as widely as possible, and therefore in as many countries and languages as possible, the gospel of birth control." Similarly, a public appeal issued by Keynes, ]. A. Hobson, and Julian Huxley, among others, asserted that a shared need for birth control knowledge and a common recognition of the "interdependence of classes and nations" might form the basis for "the ultimate union of self-interest and religion."23

The BCIIC was a thin reed upon which to place such hopes. Initially, it had correspondents in just six countries, and the addresses give the impression of an exclusive boutique rather than an evangelical religion: Geneva, Cannes, Paris, New York, Pasadena, Sydney, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The problems Sanger had with her representative in China showed how difficult real missionary work could be, and how even handpicked emissaries might escape her control. In 1929 she began sending fifty dollars a month to Agnes Smedley, a friend who was working as a journalist there, on the understanding that she would use it to start birth control clinics. Though she was a communist revolutionary and was already under surveillance by British intelligence, Smedley seemed devoted to the cause. While living in Germany she had used Sanger's money to establish several clinics on the American model, offering contraceptives exclusively rather than a broader program in maternal health and sexual counseling preferred by local advocates. When Smedley witnessed profound poverty in the streets of Shanghai, and met some of the local supporters of birth control among wealthy Chinese and Christian missionaries, she developed an entirely different attitude. "I am more and more convinced," she told Sanger, "that no b.c. work is possible until there is a national revolution that will wipe out the whole capitalist class, the land-owner class, and the foreign imperialists." Sanger considered the venture an abject failure. Shanghai was "the weakest spot in the BC movement," she wrote How-Martyn, "far more difficult than where there is no movement at all. "24

Most of Sanger's missionaries would remain loyal to her doctrine of birth control, which sought to absorb and reconcile other approaches to reproduction, including Malthusianism, eugenics, and feminism. While Sanger herself was devoted to eugenics, associates like How-Martyn and Marjorie Martin discussed it as one argument among many in attracting new followers. But whatever the rationale, all of them insisted that widening access to contraceptives was appropriate in every circumstance, and was quite possibly the solution to social, economic, and political problems. As such, this broad church of birth control came into conflict with other faiths, secular as well as religious, including Marxism and revolutionary nationalism. And the foreign or elite identity of its evangelists and early converts-not to mention their quasi-religious rhetoric-inevitably raised doubts as to whether they were any different from the missionaries who had preceded them. In 1935, when How-Martyn met and debated Gandhi, the Mahatma told her not to leave India "until you have converted me or converted yourself. "25

The cause of population control could never be entirely foreign in places like China and India, which had rich intellectual traditions concerning its quantitative and qualitative aspects as well as hundreds of years of practical experience in regulating fertility. Even so, these countries had long served as negative models in both Malthusian theory and such pivotal moments as the Besant-Bradlaugh trial, when Annie Besant had blamed their famines on overpopulation. Though neither Gandhi nor How-Martyn mentioned Besant in their 1935 meeting, she could not have been far from their thoughts when they debated who would convert whom. After all, Besant had renounced the cause of birth control to convert to Theosophy and, through it, embrace Hindu spiritualism. She had finally passed away in Madras only two years earlier.26

The politics of population in the West and the larger nations of Asia did not just intersect; they sometimes ran parallel. The similarities presaged both the problems any global movement would encounter and some possible solutions. Eugenics organizations active in China, India, and Japan shared a concern that birth control endangered the survival of the fittest. Much of the history of population control in Asia, as elsewhere, revolved around efforts to reconcile widening access to contraception with programs aiming at national or racial renewal. And here too, common ground could often be found by focusing on the welfare of mothers and their children.

By the time Sanger and others began sustained campaigns in the 1930s in China and India, these were hardly "backward countries" as far as birth control was concerned. In some respects, they were at the forefront. For instance, concerns about population growth had been voiced in the Assembly of the princely state of Mysore since 1881, and in 1920 the Maharajah had donated a tidy sum to Britain's Eugenics Education Society. A decade later he took up birth control. At the request of the state's senior medical officer, How-Martyn supplied a list of eminent persons who were only, first, or second children, apparently satisfying the Maharajah that "it is not necessary to have big families in order to get people of genius." When two state hospitals were authorized to provide contraceptives as part of maternal health care in June 1930, Mysore achieved the distinction of having the world's first government-sponsored birth control clinics outside the USSR. Meanwhile, the founder of the new National Midwifery School in Beijing, Marion Yang, included contraception in the curriculum and required all students to apply their knowledge at a local clinic established that same year. Graduates were then dispatched to the provinces with instructions to train new midwives. Yang would go on to establish fifty-four regional midwifery schools. While all this was happening, the U.S. government would scarcely even discuss birth control. Organizers of a White House conference on child health and protection in 1930 refused to give it any place on the agenda and confiscated all records that broached the subject.27

The fight for birth control in Asia occasioned alliances no less complex than in the UK or the United States. Yang worked hand in hand with nationalist population experts like Guangdan Pan and Da Chen, who were mainly concerned with eugenics. In Japan as well, some advocates of birth control allied with eugenicists-whether our of sincere conviction, as in the case of Raich6 Hiratsuka, who was inspired by much the same maternalist ideology as Alva Myrdal, or merely political expediency, as with Shidzue Ishimoto. All could agree on the ideal of improving maternal health care even while differing on organizational tactics.28

But it was India, not China or Japan, that became the launching pad for a movement that would make population control the overriding priority. Like China, India had long served to exemplify the problem of overpopulation. But whereas China-beset by banditry and warlordism, communist revolution and Japanese invasion-approximated the Malthusian nightmare all too well, India remained relatively accessible and accommodating. There were regular sailings from England and extensive rail and telegraph networks. Although Sanger was now accustomed to traveling first class, even she was impressed when a "lovely car and spiffy driver" awaited her at the end of a red carpet before a Maharajah's palace. "Life is so easy and charming and warm and bright for those who have money." Sanger had also received the royal treatment in Japan-even Marie Stopes was treated like a star. In both countries demographic growth seemed to threaten international repercussions. Bur unlike Japan, where fertility soon became the object of a pro-natalist policy by a state increasingly unwilling to brook foreign interference, India under the Raj remained open to inspection and instruction.29

Innumerable Americans and Europeans therefore traveled to India, witnessed "overpopulation" firsthand, and returned ashen-faced, suitably appalled, to tell others of their experience. "Bur how humanity breeds here," How-Martyn exclaimed upon her arrival. She reported to Sanger that Indians, however attractive, "have the animal's unquestioning acceptance of life as it is and its surroundings." The layout ofIndian cities, with narrow paths following irregular patterns, gave the impression that the whole country was impossibly overcrowded-more than a century earlier British visitors had come to the same conclusion. This outsider's view of Indians as being one with nature, and a force of nature, remained common long after independence. Such figures as Julian Huxley, Claude Levi-Strauss, Dwight Eisenhower, and Paul Ehrlich-whose Population Bomb provided the most famous account-all reported a feeling of being overwhelmed by the corporeality of Indian crowds at close quarters, and a new commitment to the cause of population control.30

As in Japan and China, considerable numbers ofIndian academics, doctors, businessmen, and officials were already aware of the possibility of shaping population for political purposes. But in this case nearly all spoke and wrote in English, and could therefore more easily contribute to the formation of an expanding but still predominantly Anglo-American network of birth controllers. Sanger personally received about a thousand letters from India between 1922 and 1935. Authors like Pyare Kishan Wattal, Bhalchandra Trimbak Ranadive, and Radhakamal Mukherjee were published in London and New York. And for a time the Bombay-based Marriage Hygiene, under the direction of Aliyappin Padmanabha Pillay, was considered one of the world's leading journals of sexual research. Indians regularly attended international population conferences and would soon begin to host their own. While official bodies in China and Japan also promulgated positions on population by the early 1940s, a decade later it was India that finally launched the world's first national policy to limit growth, a policy that was designed in consultation with international organizations and funded from abroad. Narrating this earlier history, and placing it within the larger context of a crisis of colonial rule, can help explain why.31

Before the 1931 census, colonial administrators described the state of India's public health with weary resignation. "The people multiply like rabbits and die like flies," complained Sir John Megaw, soon to become directorgeneral of the Indian Medical Service (IMS). "Until they can be induced to restrict their rate of reproduction there is no hope of doing much good by medical relief and sanitation, as the population is very nearly up to the possible limit." The discovery that Indians had somehow managed to sutpass this limit and were living a bit longer created a degree of alarm that bordered on panic: "Nature now threatens to take her revenge for our interference with her destructive powers," Megaw warned. "The country is in a state of emergency which is passing rapidly toward one of crisis."32

Over the preceding decade, death rates had declined by about a quarter. Those who survived their first five years could now expect to live until the ripe age of 38. The resulting rate of population increase was still not particularly high: about 1 percent a year. Nevertheless, it was enough to increase India's already sizable population by almost thirty-three million in a decade. It is still not clear how much of this can be attributed to improved public health and famine relief efforts rather than the development of natural immunity, the emergence of less virulent strains of microbes, or more stable agricultural productivity due to more consistent rainfall. In 1935 there were still no qualified health officers in most of the municipalities in India, malaria continued to carry off a million or more every year, malnutrition remained common, and tuberculosis may have actually increased.33

Yet, for all these deficiencies, health budgets were finally under the control of Indian assemblies and ministers. They spent more money on health than ever before, both in absolute terms and per capita, with programs that increasingly reached beyond favored enclaves. Career British officials fiercely resisted what they considered political interference, fighting to defend the independence of the IMS and retain control over budgets. Coming in the midst of an economic crisis and pressures for austerity, the possibility that spending on public health had created new problems further complicated this continuing struggle.34

Population growth also put into sharper relief the continuing controversy over the status of Indian women, a controversy that had become international in scope after Katherine Mayo published Mother India. Indian nationalists had taken up the challenge by demanding that the government prohibit child marriage, exposing as a sham its claim that the Raj stood for progress. The British actually depended on the support of the most conservative Hindu and Muslim leaders. Women's groups, organized into the All India Women's Conference (AIWC), successfully argued that fulfilling their duty as mothers to the nation required having rights and dignity. They were critical of the passage in 1929 of the Sarda Act, the first legislation prohibiting child marriage, though they would have to keep fighting to see it enforced.35

In this charged environment, concerns about population growth would therefore inspire assemblies of Indian women, international conferences, and a prolonged debate in India's own Council of State. Running through it all was the now old question of control: Who would control fertility, and for whom? But in India, the ideological, political, and practical considerations assumed unprecedented complexity, as a gathering movement with global aspirations finally came to ground.

When the representative of Bihar and Orissa, Imam Hossain, rose in India's Council of State to introduce a resolution calling on the government to check population growth, he immediately captured the paradox of any such proposition: "It is a matter," he explained, "which primarily concerns the masses, the dumb millions, whose voice is never heard in the councils of the Government." When challenged as to whether he was speaking for these masses, he did not hesitate: "It is not what they want, but what is good for them." Hossain went on to betray that his own concern was above all the threat that "class warfare" and "violent revolution" posed to both the wealthy elites represented in the Council and their imperial overlords. "It is for the safety of the British Government itself that they ought to take steps now, otherwise," he warned, "they will be swamped by the coming hordes."36

British officials were no less worried. Megaw, now president of the India Office's Medical Board, had gone public in a special meeting of the East India Association in London. But what was to be done? The renowned feminist Eleanor Rathbone suggested that government doctors were dutybound to provide contraceptive advice. Megaw refused to accept this rhetorical "stick" and "proceed led] to beat the government with it." He warned that any birth control legislation would only become another Sarda Act.37

Just as Megaw predicted, the Council of State debate put government ministers in the most awkward position-especially when members quoted Megaw in urging official action. But others accused Hossain and his allies of advocating infanticide, or worse. One Bengali suggested that he would urge contraceptives on Muslims only so that his co-religionists could outreproduce them. Another representative held up an illustrated birth control manual, outraged that anyone would suggest distributing it to their wives and daughters. It was impossible, he concluded, "to convert east into west as the twain can never meed" ("They will, Sir," a colleague replied, "and they have!")

When at last the home secretary, Maurice Hallett, responded for the government, he suggested that he was given the assignment only because his ministry was already so unpopular. Along with the new director-general of the IMS-claiming to cover "the scientific aspect of this question"-he resorted to Pearl's now-discredited logistic curve theory to suggest that, as with laboratory mice, India's fertility rate would naturally and inevitably decline. But the crux of the matter was political: considering the controversial nature of the question, and the position the British held in India, it was "very difficult and dangerous for them to step in and take an active part in measures of this kind."

Before the resolution was finally defeated-just as similar resolutions had been defeated in the Delhi and Bombay municipal assemblies-some representatives suggested that it would be better for voluntary associations to advance the cause. In fact, the AIWC had already endorsed the dissemination of birth control. But as a group of elite women, it too seemed to lack the standing to speak for "the population ofIndia." Some members of the AIWC claimed only to speak to "the ignorant and the poor ... who need our guidance and advice," as a Kashmiri Brahman put it. Other AIWC leaders would back sterilization of the "unfit" and broader dissemination of birth control as a means to reduce differential fertility. In the Council of State debate, one representative wryly observed that he had "never known them to carry propaganda to the outlying villages, to these dumb millions with whom we are very much concerned."38

These problems of class, religion, nationalism, and gender did not exhaust all the possible complications of advocating population control in India. The most vocal proponents were upper-caste Hindus upset that popular movements were challenging their privileges. This included Ragunath Karve and Narian Sitaram Phadke, both Brahmans from Maharashtra, whom Sanger had aided when they lost their jobs because of birth control advocacy. Pillay, a Tamil Brahman, complained that charity was permitting the unfit to survive and reproduce, and called for either voluntary or coercive sterilization. Wattal, one of the most widely cited authorities, was a Kashmiri pandit who asserted that lower castes and Muslims had higher rates of fertility. Lacking actual data, he inferred a general relationship between superior and inferior social strata from the 1911 census of Scotland. But Radhakamal Mukherjee, a Bengali Brahman, claimed to have statistical proof when he convened the first Indian Population Conference in Lucknow in 1936. Mukherjee later headed the subcommittee on population of the Congress Party's National Planning Committee.39

It would be too simple to equate the cause of population control in India with the interests of upper-caste and upper-class Hindus. The sponsor of the Council of State measure was a Muslim, and the leader of the Dalits-or "untouchables"-of Maharashtra, B. R. Ambedkar, would introduce another resolution backing birth control in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1938.40 Spokesmen for many different communities used notions of both population quantity and quality to express their anxieties and aspirations because they seemed to make political, cultural, and social changes precisely measurable and amenable to scientific explanation. But terms like biological scale, fitness, and overpopulation remained vague enough to be translatable into countless local contexts, and would have to be if they were to define policies and programs acceptable to each one. This process of translation produced new ideas with potential applications that went far beyond the particular community in question, and far beyond India. Because, despite their many differences, all the participants-whether colonial officials, or high-caste Hindus, or American feminists-had to consider ways to convince or coerce people unlike themselves to accept new standards of reproductive behavior.

India proved, for example, that even the very poorest people could not be relied on to want fewer children. Those who shared Sanger's faith that the value of birth control was self-evident would often ignore this lesson. Others approached contraception as just a tool to fix political and economic problems. Public health officials, in particular, had more experience in the challenges of large-scale social engineering projects, and they were already proposing what would later be called "information, education, and communication" programs aimed at "demand creation." Megaw, for instance, suggested devoting fully a third of India's education budget to "well-organized propaganda" in film and radio to promote what he called life planning. "The whole outlook on life of the people of India," he claimed, "might well be revolutionized within a few years." Similarly, Wendell Cleland, a professor at American University in Cairo, argued that Egypt's overpopulation problem required national reeducation under international supervision: "By arousing the people's latent desires for better health, more creature comforts, intellectual growth, and the spiritual satisfactions which flow from these, the matter of population increase would probably take care of itself." Imam Hossain was more pragmatic when he called for including in secondary school curricula "hints" about contraceptive technique and discouragement of large families. To reach rural areas he suggested mobile birth control clinics, which would become a fixture in postwar campaigns. So too was visual propaganda, which his supporters in the Council of State already recognized as key to swaying illiterate audiences.41

There were also, already, serious discussions about what message the new media might convey, and the impressions they must absolutely avoidespecially at the first Birth Control in Asia conference, convened at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in November 1933. It was organized by How-Martyn and the BCIIC, and included such eminent speakers as Harold Laski, Eleanor Rathbone, and Krishna Menon, indicating the kind of attention such questions were beginning to attract. Wattal warned against appearing to advocate population control in places like India in terms of the menace it posed to the West, perhaps alluding to Mother India. This would only discredit their local allies. Indeed, opponents cited pro-natalist policies in Europe when questioning why Westerners wanted to limit the population of India. Another speaker, Helena Wright, concluded that "the control of the movement ought to be in the country in which the work is taking place." She would go on to train generations of foreign doctors and nurses in contraceptive technique in her London clinic. And this idea of protecting and promoting local leaders-or at least avoiding the impression of imposing a Western agenda-would recur again and again in years to come.42

Scientists and activists still confronted the same question of who would control birth control, and to what end. As Robert Kuczynski argued at the Birth Control in Asia conference: "Birth-control will be a very good thing for millions of individual women in India and China, but this does not imply that it will necessarily be the best solution for the community of India and China as a whole." These potentially conflicting interests could be reconciled through the formula "fewer births and better in quality," as a Bombay public health official, Nasarvanji Choksy, put it before the Council of State. Borrowing another idea from eugenicists, it could be easily and vividly represented by contrasting a small, happy family with the miserable fate of an unplanned family of fourteen-or twelve, or twenty. This was already the theme of a film Choksy had promoted in Bombay, and it would recur in virtually all the family planning campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. By such means, he explained, these campaigns could be justified "not only for the sake of reducing the population but for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the women, the mothers of our children. "43

Some went even further-not just recognizing women's role in reproducing society, but promoting their personal autonomy. The vice chancellor of the University of Madras, Ramunni Menon, told the Council of State, "It is now fairly well accepted that the progress of education will almost automatically bring about a reduction in the birth rate ... particularly female education." Taraknath Das had said much the same thing before Sanger's 1926 conference in New York. But while birth control proponents were quite diverse and usually divided, none took up the cause of women's education. That would have undermined efforts to forge an alliance with eugenicists, because it would only remind them of how contraception helped educated women avoid contributing to the gene pool. Instead, they could agree that the solution was to find a simpler, cheaper contraceptive that could be used by uneducated people.

In the half-century since the first rubber diaphragms, there had been no major advance in contraceptives. The prospect of increasing demand only made the shortcomings of this method all the more apparent. It required individual fitting by trained personnel and even then failed many who used it. The only practical results of the London conference were to endorse the plans for the BClIC to send an organizer to India and to train Asian medical students at local birth control clinics. Everyone realized that only a tiny minority of Indian women would ever see a Western-trained doctor, and many would refuse examination by a male physician. There were only about four hundred women doctors in the whole country.44

But the search for "methods adapted to the wives of dull-minded natives" -as the secretary of the Rockefeller-supported Committee on Maternal Health (CMH) put it-had already begun. In 1927 a CMH initiative led to the creation of the Birth Control Investigation Committee, which grew into an international network of researchers run out of London. Many of those intent on developing simpler contraceptives were primarily concerned with influencing the reproductive behavior of simple people. "The future of Birth Control necessitates the discovery of a method which is simple and effective and which does not require the cooperation of the individual," as a 1934 paper presenting research on injectable contraceptives put it. In the 1920s and 1930s there were at least twelve such studies. Contraceptives had to be made foolproof, in other words, if fools were to use them. As C. P. Blacker explained in a successful 1935 appeal to Britain's Eugenics Society to back the Birth Control Investigation Committee:

Even the most sanguine supporter of sterilization must expect a considerable amount of time to elapse before dysgenic persons are sterilized in sufficient numbers to produce racial effects. And even after the lapse of years, it is possible that not more than a few hundred persons will be sterilized annually. Such results, excellent in themselves, would not have effects in any way comparable to those which would follow the discovery of a simple, reliable, and fool-proof contraceptive. As an achievement of negative eugenics, such a discovery would have racial consequences thousands of times more important.
Simpler contraceptives promised "racial consequences" not just locally, but globally. The principal contraceptive evaluator for the Birth Control Investigation Committee, Cecil Voge, aimed at a contraceptive that would be "so easy to use that the most ignorant woman in the Orient, the tropics, the rural outposts or the city slums might be protected."45

Sanger was also impatient for a technological fix. Unlike many eugenicists, she had faith that individual women would make good use of simple contraceptives under their own control. As early as 1932 she spoke of "the 'pill,' the magic 'pill'" as the solution. "Until that is found we will have to fight on and on." She was also meeting disappointment in organizational efforts. In November 1933, leaders of the American Birth Control League and the American Eugenics Society agreed to ask the Population Association of America to try to bring the two organizations together in a federation. An ABCL representative explained that the falling fertility rate required them to "promote births among the more intelligent." Fairchild invited Sanger together with the leaders of virtually all of the other major U.S. organizations to a February 1934 meeting. They discussed collaborating in publications and fund-raising, finally agreeing to form a consultative "Council on Population Policy." But nothing concrete ever came of it. The aims of these groups were still too divergent, and the PAA delegates were not even allowed to speak on behalf of what the leadership insisted was an apolitical association of scientists.46

Whatever their differences, Sanger insisted that all of these groups shared "one common enemy, one group of opposition objecting to everything we do or what we say-the Catholic Church." For five years she had been working to repeal the Comstock Law, and came tantalizingly close. But every time the Catholic Church had defeated her. When a Senate bill was close to winning a majority, the NCWC solicited support from some three thousand organizations and individuals. It was therefore able to testify in the name of sixteen national, nine state, and seventeen hundred local bodies. "The main burden of making articulate the opposition of the various religions, social, and labor groups has fallen to the National Catholic Welfare Conference," as one official reported to the apostolic delegate, Giovanni Cicognani. Many had no presence in Washington. Since it was important that the cause not be completely identified with the Catholic Church, the official reported, "we arrange whereby the opposition hearing is technically at least held under the supervision of a 'neutral' organization."47

The NCWC also had access to top officials in Roosevelt's administration, which had benefited from strong Catholic support in the 1932 election. When Cicognani came to present his credentials together with the general secretary of the NCWC, Father John]. Burke, they were ushered from the executive office-walking past those who actually had ambassadorial status-into the White House itself They congratulated Roosevelt for appointing Catholics to govern the Philippines and Puerto Rico, America's two largest colonial possessions, but warned about the spread of the birth control movement abroad. Smiling, FDR replied that he "had given orders to Governor Gore [in San Juan] not to make any speech in favor of birth control." Roosevelt bid his eminence to return so that he could introduce his wife. Sanger, for her part, could not even get a meeting with Eleanor, whom she had once counted among her allies.48

While Sanger directed her American organization to try to overturn the Comstock Law in the courts, she decided to redirect her own energies back to international work-India in particular. The Catholic hierarchy would have a harder time stopping her in countries where Catholics were a tiny minority. As the NCWC grudgingly acknowledged, "Mrs. Sanger is an indefatigable propagandist, and seems never to tire or be discouraged." With the BClIC she had a base upon which to build. Its budget was small, but the staff volunteered under How-Martyn's capable management. A tight-knit board of English patrons, especially Harry and Gerda Guy and Maurice Newfield, were devoted to the cause and deferred to Sanger's leadership. Official correspondents now reported from twenty-five countries, the newsletter enjoyed a growing circulation, and visitors from abroad regularly dropped by for weekly talks-among them, Jawaharlal Nehru. HowMartyn had already made an exploratory visit to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and had just returned from a tour of India. During her three months on the subcontinent, she addressed seventy-nine meetings.49

With her own much higher profile, and without a Briton's colonial baggage, Sanger thought she could bring enough publicity to the cause of birth control in India to make it an example for the world. It would also appeal to wealthy donors. The BClIC had already had two successful fund-raisers in London to send How-Martyn abroad: a "Malthusian Ball" under the patronage of Princess Alice, and a dinner given by Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, wife of a prominent Indian official. Writing to Albert Milbank, Sanger claimed that her visit "may well affect our future civilization." Critics of the birth control movement had charged it with reducing the population of Western countries without doing anything in the East. "Here now is our opportunity to balance the populations of the world."50

Sanger appealed to the British Eugenics Society through C. P. Blacker, explaining that she had two aims and both merited their support: "first, to bring to the poorer and biologically worse-endowed stocks the knowledge of birth control that is already prevalent among those who are both genetically and economically better favored; and secondly, to bring the birth rates of the East more in line with those of England and the civilizations of the West." She mentioned only the first when she stopped in London and described her plans in a BBC radio address. She was going to India, she announced, not because it suffered from any absolute overpopulation, but rather because birth control could bring happiness to individual families. But in India, as in the West, it was unevenly distributed, leading to "dysgenic" differential fertility between the "well endowed" and the "not so well endowed." She would therefore encourage its dissemination among "the social, economic and biological classes in which it is most urgently needed."51

Sanger received a tremendous send-off in several London fund-raisers, the most glittering of which took place in the onetime operating theater of the Barber-Surgeons' Hall. "When the history of our civilization is written it will be a biological history," H. G. Wells declared, "and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine." Julian Huxley thought she had affected the structure of the world more profoundly than Franklin Roosevelt. Perhaps after one too many toasts from Henry VIII's Royal Grace Cup, Wells insisted her historical importance would surpass that of Alexander and Napoleon.52

On her arrival in Bombay, Sanger disembarked from the Viceroy of India and was met by a delegation of almost fifty along with a personal invitation from Gandhi. Though she would address sixty-four meetings over the following nine weeks and travel ten thousand miles, she knew the journey to the Mahatma's ashram in Wardha would attract the most attention. She was assisted by a publicist who wrote daily press releases, and some 377 American newspapers in forty-three states reported her travels. But Sanger's encounter with Gandhi was the one that made headlines. 53

Sanger had been warned of what to expect. When Gandhi had argued with How-Martyn earlier that year, he had complained that, rather than seeking to convert him through their correspondence, Sanger had "cursed" him in the newspapers. Gandhi, for his part, had condemned contraceptives as a curse of modernity, making possible the celebration of sensual pleasure as an end in itself This only exhausted body and mind. Gandhi echoed many of his contemporaries, like Oswald Spengler, who linked the rational control of reproduction to the decline of spiritualism and predicted the ultimate demise of modern civilization. But whereas Spengler equated fertility with the vital force of a people, Gandhi thought spiritual life required mastering "animal passions." In fact, he thought Indians should have smaller families, which would also be healthier families. But the only acceptable means was abstinence. When How-Martyn had pointed out that some women might be at the mercy of their husbands, he insisted that no woman could ever be raped if she were prepared to die fighting. Margaret Cousins considered Gandhi and his "medieval views" on women to be "the greatest stumbling block to the B.C. movement in India."54

Sanger found Gandhi cordial but unyielding. A decade earlier, when they had debated in print, Sanger appeared to claim greater spiritual enlightenment than the Mahatma. Arguing that sex was the most spiritual of all experiences, she presented birth control as a moral instrument of selfdevelopment. Perhaps recalling this gambit, Gandhi now claimed to be the greater feminist, because he would leave childbearing decisions entirely up to women. But abstinence was still the only acceptable means, even if wives must resist their husbands. He did not seem to consider the possibility that women might also have some interest in sex-despite having claimed to know "tens of thousands of women," so completely identifying with them as to be "half a woman" himself. He insisted that he was better qualified to speak for his "unsophisticated sisters" than Sanger's allies in the AIWC. Sanger, for her part, asserted universal sisterhood, having worked with tens of thousands of women around the world. "I believe firmly that the heart of the Indian woman is not different from the heart of the American, Chinese, Italian, or European woman where love is concerned."55

The duel continued for a day and a half. Gandhi claimed to represent the common people, whereas Sanger appealed to universal sisterhood. Both invoked the power of large numbers. Moreover, they agreed that uncontrolled reproduction was a social problem, making India's population sickly and weak. And both saw a solution in making people-and especially women-understand that they had a duty to plan their families. If anything, Gandhi was even more emphatic about individuals' need to take responsibility for the size, health, and even aesthetics of India's population. "Is it right," he asked, "for us who know the situation to bring forth children?"

We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless .... Not till India has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth progeny .... I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being. 56
Sanger felt she won a concession when Gandhi said that he did not necessarily favor lifelong celibacy, and that the "safe period" might be the answer subject to further study. Researchers had recently confirmed when ovulation occurred in the menstrual cycle. Sanger did not publicize Gandhi's openness to the rhythm method at the time, perhaps because it was endorsed by growing numbers of Catholics. Casti Connubii was silent on the practice, and a veritable cottage industry had sprung up to offer instruction. The problem was-and is-that the menstrual cycle is variable, making even advanced techniques unreliable.57

But with no "magic pill," and no other way to reach Indian women lacking access to a doctor, Sanger herself could only offer a new and untested method: a foaming powder that, when applied to a square sponge inserted into the vagina, was meant to form a spermicidal barrier. HowMartyn thought it "would revolutionise the whole B.e. propaganda as it is so simple clinics and doctors are not necessary." But there had been little or no investigation of its safety or effectiveness. It was only after Sanger had crisscrossed India promoting foam powder that she decided to send it to the USSR and China for clinical trials. She was probably reacting to the news that another foam powder had caused painful irritation when tested on dogs. Lydia DeVilbiss, a notorious racist, had been promoting it to black Floridians and had tried to pass it off for use in India and China as well. It was only later still that Sanger had animal tests performed on her own formula. By that point she had helped establish some twenty clinics and forty contraceptive information centers in India, everywhere promoting foam powder as the method of choice. 58

The problems with foam powder would eventually undermine all of Sanger's work in India. But while she was still there she was preoccupied with an unfolding crisis within the Bcne. The immediate cause was resentment toward How-Martyn for operating independently of the Center's board even while using its funds to pay for her overseas travel. In reply to concerns about where the money would come from, How-Martyn had joked to Newfield that she would borrow it if need be-she was living off a small inheritance. "It is thrilling to live dangerously sometimes, don't you agree?" A major Canadian donor, Alvin Kaufman, demanded that she return to London rather than accompany Sanger to Southeast Asia and China. Sanger tried to smooth over these differences but resented the board's efforts to exert remote control.59

As in the failed effort to coordinate American population organizations in 1934, these difficulties reflected disagreement over basic strategy. Kaufman, a businessman worried about world revolution, insisted on reducing the number of poor people at the least possible expense, an increasingly common attitude among donors. Birth control volunteers also found it difficult to contend with questions about what, exactly, all their globetrotting accomplished. "A report of contacts in many foreign countries may sound inspiring ... ," Kaufman observed, "but is not so inspiring to me when I hear nothing further in regard to actual results." There had been no follow-up, for instance, to How-Martyn's tour through the Middle East. He complained that "too much money is spent on traveling," and suggested giving greater responsibility to local organizers able to subsist on lower wages-like the two he already employed in Korea. Sanger countered that, in India, with its population of 350 million, "we must have sufficient propaganda and publicity to elicit native forces-favorable and adverse so that we may foster and guide indigenous effort." Just as Sanger used one illegal pamphlet and clinic in Brooklyn to spark a debate across America, she appeared to hope that a publicity tour and a few dozen clinics could begin to move India.60

Rather than turn over control to her counterparts in India, Sanger tried to raise funds to hire How-Martyn as a full-time organizer. "What I want most to do," she explained to Harry Guy, " ... is to avoid a personal conflict and a growing resentment which will most certainly result in an opposition movement." She was still feuding with both the ABCL and Marie Stopes, British eugenicists were bucking Blacker's efforts to push a reform program more palatable to public opinion, and Nazi race theory as well as Gini's splinter group posed a growing threat to the unity of the IUSIPP. With her international work barely getting off the ground, Sanger wanted desperately to prevent any further fragmentation.61

Nevertheless, an embittered How-Martyn resigned from the BClIC, and illness forced Sanger to cut short her trip before touring China. But at the same time, in Britain there emerged signs of a potential breakthrough-not in contraceptive technology, but in ideology and organizational politics, a new consensus that came to be known as "family planning." The problems with Kaufman were mere "trivialities," as Newfield put it, compared with the "opportunities that are being created by the cooperation of the [National Birth Control Association] and the Eugenics Society." Both otganizations needed a more positive vision than "family limitation" on the one hand and "sterilization of the unfit" on the other. Birth controllers feared that a declining population would make fund-raising impossible for cash-strapped clinics. British eugenicists, on the other hand, were financially secure but frustrated at their inability to translate propaganda campaigns into actual practice. They had long been interested in ascertaining "how poor and incompetent a section of the community it may be hoped that Birth Control would penetrate if it were introduced into Welfare centers."62

A merger would give birth controllers the resources to secure and expand their network of clinics. Eugenicists, on the other hand, would have the assurance that these clinics provided contraceptives to the type of people who "needed them most," at the same time offering infertility treatment and other encouragement to parents with better prospects. In this way birth control could be "the basis of eugenics," as the leaders of both organizations concluded in a joint memorandum: "We mean a selective control by which some births are restricted and others encouraged." And the birth control clinic, as "the organization which can best provide guidance and instruction," would be "the operative unit of all eugenic policy."63

The concept of family planning had broader origins than the immediate needs of Britain's two leading population organizations, and it would ultimately have a global impact. In different places it took on different inflections, but Gunnar and Alva Myrdal offered the most comprehensive and influential articulation. Like their counterparts across Europe and the United States, they were concerned that Sweden was headed for a decline in population, which the ever wider dissemination of contraceptives would only accelerate. Notwithstanding Gunnar's later contributions to the understanding of American racism, he and Alva did not consider immigration to be an acceptable solution. They worried that it would likely originate in southern and eastern Europe or even Mrica and Asia, and thus threaten the Swedish volk. Instead, they called for a comprehensive program of providing contraceptives to everyone to ensure that every child would be a wanted child. At the same time, they sought to improve the conditions for childrearing so that good parents would want more children. Everyone, even bachelors, had an interest in the next generation, so all of society should share the costs of properly caring for them. In 1937-38, Sweden's "Mothers and Babies" parliament accepted these proposals, legalizing birth control and abortion while providing maternity relief and subsidized housing.64

Yet improving the social conditions for child-rearing presented a problem. As Alva Myrdal noted, it could lead to "increased fertility in some groups hereditarily defective" at a time in which mortality was already declining among the "deficient." She concluded that the situation "demands some corresponding corrective." In their writings as well as their participation on government commissions, the Myrdals therefore urged "quite ruthless" policies for sterilizing people deemed seriously defective, including the use of force against "those incapable of rational decisions." In 1941 Sweden greatly broadened grounds for sterilization, and by the end of the decade authorities had cited eugenic indications in sterilizing more than eight thousand people. Hundreds more received the same treatment simply because of "antisocial" behavior.65

In the Myrdals' model of the welfare state, giving everyone access to birth control did not preclude controlling populations. It was a necessary precondition. The genius of family planning was to imply that parents would do the planning, whereas the Myrdals expected social engineers to create the conditions that would shape parents' preferences (and in some cases compel more rational choices). Ideas like free school lunches provided an appealing package for this program, and won the Myrdals an international audience. In Great Britain, this is what most impressed Sir William Beveridge when he issued his famous report in 1942, a blueprint for the Labour Party's postwar social program. Yet very specific concerns about population quality and quantity continued to recur even in the most general discussions of the welfare state. In an influential critique of protectionist agricultural policies that inflated food prices, the Australian economist F. L. McDougall underlined the importance of improving nutrition for what he called "the young human breeding stock of the advanced countries" as a way to reduce the number of defectives. By reducing infant mortality rates, it was also a more effective way to reverse quantitative declines than paying parents to have children.66

As the debate about population quality broadened to include the whole range of environmental factors, and included many more people as well, subjects like nutrition and disease displaced old-fashioned negative eugenics. McDougall's ideas inspired the League of Nations to establish an expert panel to investigate the prevalence of malnutrition and come up with uni- eugenicists would have to win popular support and shape reproductive behavior across the whole social spectrum. As he explained to one of the Birth Control Investigation Committee's researchers, "Since our eugenic proposals are all voluntary, it seems to me to be in the highest degree necessary to enlist the cooperation and support of dysgenic people. . . . You are not likely to enlist their sympathy if you speak about them disparagingly as dregs and scum." Blacker had better political skills and a more advantageous position than Pearl to advance this agenda: as general secretary, he represented the Eugenics Society in merger negotiations with the National Birth Control Association (NBCA) and damage control operations meant to distance them from the Nazis. He was also secretary of the Birth Control Investigation Committee and, after the war, drafted the constitution of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).70

In the United States the job of reconciling birth control and eugenics through the concept of family planning fell to the wealthy and wellconnected Frederick Osborn, who was a friend of Blacker's ever since the two met at the 1927 Geneva conference. Osborn had devoted himself to years of independent study of the nature-nurture question in the office of his uncle, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. Whereas the elder Osborn had promoted compulsory sterilization and rebuffed Sanger, his nephew concluded it was a mistakeas a matter both of science and of policy-to focus only on the heredity of the most or least fit. Mter chairing the short-lived Council on Population Policy, he recognized in the Swedish model a way to win broad public support. "Greater freedom of choice as to size of family," he declared in 1937, "should be regarded as a major aim of eugenics." Over the following two years, with Osborn as its secretary, a rejuvenated American Eugenics Society doubled in membership'71

Neither Osborn nor Blacker was a scientist, but both appreciated the usefulness of promoting the scientific study of population. They were in a better position than Sanger to manage male scientists' egos and publicize new research. It was Osborn who had dissuaded Sanger from running for office in the PAA, which was now a home to researchers of every political persuasion. He had also financed the Eugenics Research Association. And in 1936 he induced the Milbank Memorial Fund and Princeton University to create an Office of Population Research (OPR). Under Frank Notestein, the OPR became a leader in policy-oriented demographic studies and a model for similar centers in the United States and abroad. Blacker, for his private detective to intercept one wayward monsignor before he showed his "Wheel of Life" to FOR advisor Harry Hopkins. This prompted Cicognani to write to Rome for insrructions.74

After more than a year, the Holy Office finally replied that the rhythm method might be "tolerated as an extreme remedy and a means to turn the faithful away from sin." But they must not "give the impression that the way to the limitation of births is left completely open." There was to be no further publicity. Instead, bishops would be quietly told to convey the Church's teaching on the rhythm method to priests. In their capacity "as physicians and directors of souls," priests would determine who among their penitents might be permitted to use it. The bishop who presided over the NCWC's laymen's and laywomen's organizations argued that it proved that "virtue and self-discipline and real manliness are on the side of the Catholic Church, and self-indulgence and weakness and a surrender to the lower instincts are on the other side."75

When u.s. federal courts overturned the Comstock Law that same year, they too gave professionals-in this case, medical doctors-the power to determine what constituted legitimate use. Justice Augustus Hand explained that he had new information "as to the evils resulting in many cases from conception." Doctors would be able to prescribe contraceptives for the purpose of "promoting the well being of their patients" without in any way sanctioning their use for "illicit sexual intercourse." In 1937 family planning under a doctor's supervision received the seal of approval of the American Medical Association.76

Removing the stigma of illegality from contraception-even while embedding it within institutions of social control-had required a joint effort by all of the American birth control organizations. In its aftermath, the ABCL and Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau began negotiating a merger with the ultimate goal of persuading governments to offer contraceptives as part of federal and state health programs. An outside consultant suggested that the new organization promote family planning, because birth control appealed only to women and it was the support of influential men they needed most. Indeed, he advised that a man lead the new group.77

In 1939 the ABCL and Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau united as the Birth Control Federation of America. Sanger was made honorary chair, but Kenneth Rose of the same consulting firm was put in charge as national director. The new organization encouraged couples sound in body and mind to have children and instructed clinics to disseminate contraceptives only to married women who met a set of medical criteria. The next year Fairchild declared at their annual meeting that "these two great movements [eugenics and birth control] have now come to such a thorough understanding and have drawn so close together as to be almost indistinguishable." In 1942 Rose arranged a national referendum, which ratified the new approach. Henceforth the largest and most powerful family planning organization in the world, with over eight hundred clinics nationwide, would be known as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.78

In Britain the NBCA had already changed its name to the Family Planning Association (FPA) in a general meeting under the chairmanship of Lord Horder. It could not ultimately close the deal with the eugenicists because the clinics would not go along-birth control stalwarts thought it was the Eugenics Society that needed a name change. But the headquarters staff moved in with the eugenicists at 69 Eccleston Square, and promised their new patrons that they would instruct clinic workers in eugenics. The FPA also announced its intent to establish women's health centers that would provide assistance for infertility, gynecological ailments, and marriage problems. The new name was meant to "emphasize the essentially constructive nature of its work."79

Yet even while American and British population activists began to construct a broad coalition, one that could accommodate most pro-natalists, eugenicists, and birth controllers-and marginalize everyone else-the international effort began to fall apart. Soon after How-Martyn's resignation from the BCIIC in 1936, the other four members of the staff left as well, marking the start of "a completely wasted year," as Harry Guy admitted. Nearly half of the Centre's affiliates abroad also chose to stick with HowMartyn when she set up a short-lived rival organization. How-Martyn's replacement at the BCIIC began with ambitious plans but soon feuded with Sanger, who was incensed by the discovery that she was warning correspondents in India about the problems with foam powder. Sanger remained reluctant to side against How-Martyn, and the new director resigned. The Centre's board finally decided to amalgamate with the FPA without even consulting Sanger. Most of its contacts and institutional memory were already lost. A former worker visited the old premises just as the center's files were being carried out in bags for the trash.80

The FPA's new International Subcommittee seldom met, but even if it had shown more commitment and ended the feuding, the international climate was rapidly turning hostile. Commenting in 1937 on "the militarist psychology" sweeping Europe, Sanger thought it a "waste of time and money" to attempt anything there. She decided to devote herself to Asia but found it impossible to raise funds for a return trip to India and dipped into her own savings to tour East Asia. While she was en route the Japanese bombed Shanghai, almost killing Sanger's local coordinator, and Sanger decided to return home after just a week in Japan. Three months later Sanger's host in Tokyo, Shidzue Ishimoto, was arrested and interrogated about her American friends and work for birth control. A clinic Sanger had helped her open was closed for the duration, and Japan would subsequently make five-child families the national standard.81

Even birth control "missionaries" who were able to work in Asia, like How-Martyn and her deputy, Eileen Palmer, had little to offer. In India Sanger's onetime ally, Pillay, had publicly repudiated foam powder. The FPA, for its part, could only suggest local manufacture of cervical capswhich were useless without trained personnel to offer instruction. In 1939 Blacker's Birth Control Investigation Committee dissolved itself with only a marginally improved spermicide, Volpar-standing for "voluntary parenthood"-to its credit. The FPA did, in the end, hire an Indian organizer with the help of the Eugenics Society, but by that point they could offer little support. When they sent a shipment of Volpar in 1941, it took seven months to arrive.82

Everywhere the coming of war disrupted already faltering efforts to maintain the international networks of population scientists and activists that had been so painstakingly assembled over the preceding decades. A preview was offered by the progressive disintegration of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, which peaked at just thirteen national affiliates. In 1935 the U.S. and British committees boycotted an IUSIPP congress held in Berlin because of Nazi abuses of academic freedom. That same year, Gini declared his independence from the Union, accusing it of being dominated by Malthusians. He established a federation for "Latin" eugenics and established relations with like-minded groups in India, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. At the 1937 congress of the IUSIPP in Paris, Pitt-Rivers argued for revoking membership of Czechoslovakia and barring entry to the USSR, considering their respective treatment of Sudeten academics and Mendelian geneticists. German delegates, for their part, used the tribune to make the case for "eliminatory eugenics." Georges Mauco of France, who replaced Pitt-Rivers as general secretary, later claimed to have opposed the Nazi occupiers when they tried to co-opt the Union and its journal for their propaganda. But he too was a strident anti-Semite and would be charged with collaboration. Conveniently for Mauco, most of the Union's archives and library in Paris were destroyed during the war.83

In London Blacker soldiered on through the Blitz, sleeping in the offices of the Eugenics Society rather than seeking shelter. He avoided injury, but the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on the offices of The New Generation, which was all that remained of the old Malthusian League. How-Martyn safely escaped to Australia, but a good deal of her correspondence sunk en route. Years earlier she and her husband had decided to spend their fortune traveling the world, then commit suicide when the money ran out. But they could not bring themselves to do it, and eked out the rest of their days in a decrepit apartment in Sydney.84

Birth control activists who came under Nazi rule risked a far worse fate. In Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia-much more so than in the United States and UK-they tended to be outspoken advocates of legalizing abortion and tolerating homosexuality, and were thus anathema to the new regime. Indeed, the abortionist and sexual deviant were favored themes in anti-Semitic and anticommunist propaganda. Some German proponents of eugenic sterilization attained prominence and power, but only those who had endorsed it as an instrument of Aryan race hygiene and were prepared to move on to other instruments, such as medical killing. The many more who saw sterilization as integral to the welfare state, like birth control, day care, and progressive sex education, were silenced or arrested, driven to exile or suicide. And in countries considered to be Aryan, like Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands, German occupation brought the immediate closure of birth control clinics and imprisonment of their directors. Among Eastern Europeans, by contrast, the Nazis threw up obstacles to marriage, kidnapped children considered worthy of the master race, and encouraged and even compelled abortions. And by this point, what began wirh compulsory sterilization and medical killing to purify Aryan bloodlines had progressed to mass murder ofJews and Gypsies.85

Far more was at stake in this struggle for blood and soil than the fate of the birth control movement. But it was especially heartbreaking to the activists who had worked so hard in the interwar years to make friends overseas and who were now the recipients of their plaintive letters. Sanger in the United States, Ottesen-Jensen in Sweden, and Helena Wright in the United Kingdom tried to use these same international networks to arrange safe passage. It was all they were now good for, and often they were not good enough.86

In the aftermath, one might have expected the whole idea of shaping populations for political purposes to be discredited, considering the ways in which Nazis tried to control reproduction. Instead, the cause of increasing access to birth control was about to enjoy a remarkable revival. In the years immediately following World War II it won outspoken converts among the leaders of new United Nations agencies. Tentatively at first, but with increasing largesse, it gained the support of the world's richest foundations. And it would become the official policy of the largest nations.

This revival could not have been predicted at the time-indeed, proponents of population control could hardly believe their luck. But it was simply a matter of opportunity meeting preparation. Accelerating population growth in the poorest parts of the world, first noted in British India, was now occurring in many more countries. Outside observers found that the Japanese "deplored and feared" the relative increase of their colonial subjects in Korea, more and more of them crowding into Seoul or migrating to the Home Islands, even if nationalist ideology insisted that they were one  people and welcomed population growth. A 1936 census of the French empire revealed that, rather than slowing as was previously thought, population growth in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia had begun to pick up. One public health official in French Indochina remarked that "they are born too much and they don't die enough." The governor-general appointed a council to advise how continued growth could be accommodated. Concern about population increase in the British empire had now spread far beyond India. In 1939, a Royal Commission insisted that reducing birth rates was "the most pressing need of the West Indian colonies."87

The director of the U.S. Division of Territories and Island Possessions, Ernest Gruening, agreed that "Birth Control is the only hope" for Puerto Rico. He worked with the American Birth Control League to make it available in government clinics, and defied repeared protests from the National Catholic Welfare Council to secure passage of a law that legalized sterilization. It was a rare defeat for the Catholic hierarchy, and perhaps merely payback for the bishops' failure to rein in the rabidly anti-Roosevelt radio personality Father Charles Coughlin. But along with a similar public-private program in Jamaica, this marked the first time colonial powers had assisted fertility limitation.88

The West India Royal Commission observed that high fertility was a phenomenon "throughout the whole tropical and sub-tropical world," and that its "sharp contrast" to the trend among Europeans and their progeny was "of the most profound importance, with far-reaching implications." In fact, birth rates were relatively low in many parts of the tropical worldmost of Mrica, for instance. And even where they were high, and mortality had begun to fall, the resulting rate of increase was still not extraordinary by historical standards. But areas like Korea, Indochina, and India had "appallingly high" infant mortality-as a British report admitted about the West Indies. One in five infants died in many parts of the empire. In some places it was a third or even more. Infant and child mortality was three to four times higher in French Mrica and Indochina than in the metro pole. The life expectancy of Korean women in 1935 was 38.5 years, almost 10 years less than their Japanese counterparts. All of this meant that there was the potential for much more rapid growth. Even in Algeria, which had achieved a truly impressive rate of population increase of over 2 percent a year-enough to cause a doubling in thirty-five years-the governorgeneral admitted that it was still "very backward" in public health.89

Once large American and European conscript armies began to march into places like North Africa, the Middle East, and Sourh and East Asia and were exposed to the same diseases that had long plagued inhabitants there, more effective public health measures suddenly seemed like an urgent necessity. Colonial powers felt pressured to act or else answer for their failures to the United Nations. At that point population growth in poor countries truly took off. The Algerian rate of increase would be replicated-even exceeded-in all of these areas. It was already enough for a participant in the 1937 IUSIPP session to ask whether France "will be conquered-demographically speaking-by her conquest."90

To meet this threat-and opportunity-advocates of population control had prepared a set of ideas and strategies with tremendous potential. They had already seized on improving public health as both a justification-"death control" had to be balanced by birth control-and a model, because both were meant to minister to society's ills. And just as indigenous peoples had sometimes opposed public health measures, it was argued, one could not assume they would accept contraceptives with alacrity. Advocates had therefore begun to think abour "demand creation," including the use of new media and even some of the specific images-such as the "unplanned family" and fewer, better births-that might attract them. In countries like India, China, and Japan they had also discovered allies and learned they needed to let them take the lead. Moreover, Nazi population policies had shattered the international sexual reform movement while discrediting eugenicists with an explicitly racist agenda. That cleared the way for those who wanted to promote more "family friendly" policies to improve reproductive choices and child-rearing while regulating such choices through institutions of social control.

Family planning could win the allegiance of so many and different kinds of population activists, including Catholics and pro-natalists, because it simply meant encouraging what certain individuals with science and power on their side considered a more rational approach to reproduction. It required calculating the value of human beings and implied that society must have a say-locally, nationally, and globally. Applying this concept in particular cases would occasion fierce struggles, bur it could easily accommodate the idea that poor nations, like poor people, should plan to have fewer children, while rich nations and rich people should have more. The concept of family planning brought human reproduction squarely within the realm of public policy. Population control was now recognized as a tool of social engineering. It could also be a weapon.
 

1. Margaret Sanger and Hannah M. Stone, eds., The Practice of Contraception: An International Symposium and Survey-Proceedings of the Seventh International Birth Control Conference (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1931), xiii.

2. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3844; "Fifth Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform on Scientific Basis," 1932, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (hereafter SSC), PPFA 1, series 7: Subject Files, box 83, file 10.

3. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),514-516. On Pearl, see "Fondation, Oeuvre et Historique de rUnion," Archives Nationales, Paris, Georges Mauco papers, AP577, box 5.

4. Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli studi sulfa popofazione (Roma, 7-10 Settembre, 1931) 1: Sezione di Storia, p. 37, and X Sezione di Metodologia, p. 292 (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1933-34).

5. Henri Decugis, Le Destin des Races Blanches (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1935); Enid Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood (New York: W W Norton, 1934); Friedrich Burgdorfer, Sterben die U7eissen Volker? Die Zukunft der weissen und farbigen Volker im Lichte der Biologische Statistik (Munich: Georg D. W Callwey Verlag, 1934); Yasumaru Shimojo, "An Inquiry concerning the Numerical Evolution of Population," and J. Van Gelderen, "The Numerical Evolution of Population with Particular Reference to the Population of Java," Atti del Congresso internazionale, 1: Sezione di Storia, 287,312.

6. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 76-103.

7. Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 326-328; Sabine Friihstiick, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 157-163. On war of populations, see Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, The Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2002), 141-143. On settlement, see John W Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986),271-278.

8. Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled W'omen: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 53-56; David G. Horn, Social Bodies:
Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 59-60, 79-88. On colonization, see Claudio G. Segre, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 102107. For examples of Mussolini's obsessive interest in national demographic statistics, see Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, CO 1170-1171.

9. David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 98-102; Amir Weiner, " arure, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet SocioEthnic Body in the Age of Socialism," American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1114-1155. On extraction, see Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia," in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133. On deportations, see Terry Martin, "Stalinist Forced Relocation Policies: Patterns, Causes, Consequences," in Demography and National Security, ed. Myron Weiner and Sharon Stanton Russell (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001),309,315,321-322.

10. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1810-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 489, 494-497. On Hitler, see Hermann Rauschning, The lIoice of Destruction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940), 136-138; and Herve Le Bras, Le Sol et le Sang (La Tour d'Aigues: Editions de I'Aube, 1991),52-53.

11. Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996). On Mexico and Brazil, see Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 125-133, 165-166. On France, see Francis Ronsin, La Greve des Ventres: Propagande neo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalite ftan~aise, 1ge-20e siecles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 210-211; William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chaps. 7-9; Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender, trans. Kathleen A. Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 284; Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993),401-408.

12. Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985), 60-62; Allan Carlson, "The Roles of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in the Development of a Social Democratic Response to Europe's 'Population Crisis'" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1990),447-452.

13. Linda Gordon, WOmans Body, WOmans Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (1974; New York: Penguin Books, 1990),337-343.

14. On effect of the Depression, see Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 186; Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 193-194. On the United States, see Adele Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and "The Problems of Sex" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 173; Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 151.

15. Ellen Chesler, WOman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 342-343; Imre Ferenczi, "La crise des migrations et de la natalite," December 1, 1931, International Labor Organization Archives, Geneva, B. PO 2/01. On Keynes and Dublin, see Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985), 60; David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 237-238.

16. Topping memorandum, "New Birth Control Magazine," March 27, 1931, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY (hereafter RAe), Bureau of Social Hygiene Papers, series 3, box 7, file 166.

17. On deferring to Fairchild, see James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978),204. On the conference, see "Preliminary Conference on a Population Association for the United States," December 15, 1930; "Second Conference of the Population Association of America," May 7, 1931; Topping memo to Harrison, June 6, 1931, all in RAC, Bureau of Social Hygiene Papers, series 3, box 9, "Population Conference 1931"; "Population Association of America, Minutes of Second Annual Meeting," May 12, 1933, RAC, Bureau of Social Hygiene Papers, series 3, box 9, "Population 1931-33."

18. Anders S. Lunde, "The Beginning of the Population Association of America," Population Index 47, no. 3 (1981): 481; Frank Notestein, "Reminiscences:
The Role of Foundations, of the Population Association of America, Princeton University and of the United Nations in Fostering American Interest in Population Problems," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1971): 70-71.

19. Chesler, WOman of Valor, 355-356; Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 193; "The Activities of the Birth Control International Information Centre," ca. March 1934, International Planned Parenthood Federation Archives, London (hereafter IPPFA), series B, reel 214, frames 1012-1018.

20. Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, www.vatican.va/holyjatherl pius_xii encyclicals/index.htm.

21. Pacelli memorandum on relations with Germany, January 1936, and accompanying note, Pacelli to Diego von Bergen, Vatican Secret Archives, Rome (hereafter VSA), A.E.S., periodo IV, Germania, 692 P.O., fase. 260; ''Ancora dell'eugenetica et la morale cattolica," Osservatore Romano, October 6, 1933.

22. Pizzardo to Viollet