The War Against Fertility

From WSJ review of Fatal Misconception :

 

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. Six of the council's 10 founding members were eugenicists. The Ford Foundation also began giving money to the cause, initiating its own programs and handing out its own grants. Dr. Clarence Gamble, a Procter & Gamble heir, attempted various free-lance efforts to promote birth control in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He routinely referred to the citizens of these two countries as "coolies" and "natives."

As Mr. Connelly observes, the dispensers of population-control grants often enjoyed a kind of pasha existence. Frank Notestein, a longtime adviser to John D. Rockefeller 3rd, recalled that wherever he went -- Cairo, Karachi, Seoul -- he faced the prospect of a groaning table, only to face "another day of tremendous eating." Douglas Ensminger, who ran the Ford Foundation's New Delhi office, had a staff of nine people -- gardeners, maids, cooks -- to serve him. At least foundation officers knew how to benefit from the population that already existed.

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. Mr. Connelly notes that many people had by then become aware of "the dark chapters of eugenics and medical experimentation." Thus the movement shifted its emphasis. It did not give up its eugenicist mission entirely, but it also claimed to be eradicating poverty and saving the environment.