"the war against the fertillity"

The title of Martin Morse Wooster's review of Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception in the WSJ...

It is a cliché but nevertheless true that philanthropists and government bureaucrats often do more harm than good, not least when they set out to change the world. In the second half of the 20th century they actually tried to control the world's population. The idea was to encourage -- even coerce -- the women of the Third World to have fewer children. In "Fatal Misconception," Matthew Connelly, a professor at Columbia University, traces the rise and fall of the population-control movement and describes its bitter legacy.

Mr. Connelly's narrative begins in the late 19th century, but it takes on real momentum in the early 20th, with the crusading efforts of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). In 1914, Mr. Connelly recounts, Sanger and her allies tried to come up with a phrase that would capture the idea of population control and encourage women to limit their fertility. They pondered "voluntary motherhood," "voluntary parenthood," "family control" and (tellingly) "race control." They ended up with "birth control."

From the start, birth controllers were allied with eugenicists who wanted to manipulate the global population by creating -- to put it bluntly -- more smart people and fewer dumb ones....

The population controllers reorganized after World War II with the help of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, a birth-control advocate whose wealth created, in 1952, the Population Council, a population-control advocacy group....

The eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s dreamed of a "world eugenics" movement that could regulate global fertility. That movement, Mr. Connelly argues, nearly became a reality in 1970, when population controllers in Washington, New York and London appeared on the verge of creating a new international order. It was around this time that huge government aid programs -- alongside United Nations initiatives -- took over from the foundations the greater burden of the population-control agenda....

Such aggressive paternalism (to use the word ironically) created a backlash from its supposed beneficiaries. Third Worlders noticed that the population controllers were, for the most part, white men, many of whom had worked in colonial governments. Feminists complained about an insensitive male establishment telling women what to do with their lives....

The end came in two gruesome stages. When Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, declared martial law in 1975, she appointed her son Sanjay to be the nation's chief population controller. He proceeded to flatten slums and then tell the residents that they could get a new house if they would agree to be sterilized. Government officials were given sterilization quotas. Within a year, six million Indian men and two million women were sterilized. At least 2,000 Indians died as a result of botched sterilization operations....

...the population-control movement had one last campaign to champion. It offered technical assistance to China's "one child" policy of 1978-83, even helping to pay for computers that allowed Chinese officials to track "birth permits"...

As Mr. Connelly observes, global fertility is now in fact going down. But only 5% of the decline can be traced to programs funded by international population agencies. Women are having fewer children, particularly as they become wealthier. They are doing so voluntarily.