Social/Academic Movements: Eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism

Other social worlds concerned with birth control were eugenics and neo-Malthusian movements. Within and beyond the academy, across multiple disciplines and professions but probably most deeply based within biology, these two social movements were confronting birth control issues. Eugenics was a social and intellectual movement, begun in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, that sought to apply hereditarian principles of improved agricultural breeding to humans. Eugenicists hoped to breed "better" people through positive eugenic activities (increasing the reproduction of persons deemed "fit," or aristogenic) and negative eugenic activities (decreasing the reproduction of persons deemed "unfit," or cacogenic). Eugenic conceptions of fitness were deeply class- and race-based, focusing on increased reproduction among the Anglo-Saxon upper classes and decreased reproduction among the lower classes, both white (especially in England) and of color (especially in the United States and in British colonial regimes).^[18]

Most eugenicists initially opposed birth control for popular use during the early decades of this century, fearing that upper-class women would use it more effectively than would people of other classes, thereby reducing the numbers of the "fit" while the "unfit" multiplied unchecked. They viewed birth control solely as a technique for negative eugenics.^[19] Eugenicists' con-

traceptive advocacy had focused on negative eugenics since the turn of the century. Eugenicists advocated involuntary surgical sterilization of the "unfit" with institutionalized criminal, insane, and "feebleminded" people as targets of special legislation. But by the mid-1930s, such laws met with considerable opposition, especially after the Nazis copied and used them. Many eugenicists had also regarded such sterilizations as an ineffective strategy.^[20]

Demonstrating the diversities within these movements, several eugenicist strategists were also early birth control advocates. E. M. East, a Harvard biologist and member of the Advisory Board of Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau, was one. In 1925, he persuaded Sanger not to publish an attack on eugenicists in the Birth Control Review for failing to support contraception, arguing that she needed their support and that they, in time, would need her. East warned: "No matter what you say, birth control is only part of a eugenical program. It is a secondary aspect of a larger whole, but it is the key. The mere fact that so many eugenicists have not been able to think straight does not make the abstract subject itself any less valued" (Reed 1983:135). During the 1920s, other eugenicists sought evaluation of the eugenic value of contraception, including Simon Flexner, C. C. Little, and Adolph Meyer of the Committee on Eugenic Birth Control.^[21]

During the Great Depression era 1930s, more eugenicists and other social conservatives began to find contraception attractive, especially as birth control advocates exploited the issue of skyrocketing welfare costs. They talked much less of women controlling their bodies and much more of the need to "democratize" contraceptive practice—to spread it "down" from the upper and middle classes to the lower classes.^[22] Since the middle classes clearly would not stop practicing contraception, eugenicists concerned about differential fertility between classes believed that their best hope for altering "dysgenic" population trends was promoting birth control for the poor. How much this was also racialized varied among individuals and regionally (e.g., McCann 1994; Larson 1995).

Some eugenicists were swayed by Raymond Pearl's studies at Johns Hopkins of populations and reproduction by economic sector or class. In studies supported by the Milbank Fund and drawing on sophisticated Pearsonian statistics, Pearl demonstrated that the differences in fertility by class and race correlated with differences in access to and use of contraceptive information and technologies. Pearl's conclusions ran counter to current biological explanations and other social/cultural explanations (including Pearl's own beliefs) of the incapacity of the lower classes to practice contraception. The studies were therefore significant in convincing eugenicists of the need for broad-based access to contraceptives (Allen 1991; Notestein 1982). In Pearl's words, "Hitherto, everybody excepting the scientist had a chance at directing the course of human evolution. In the eugenics move-

ment an earnest attempt is being made to show that science is the only safe guide in respect to the most fundamental social problems." Pearl then sought changes in policy among the "agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations" toward providing contraceptive information (Allen 1991:235; Cooke 1997).

Under the influence of Fredrick Osborn, men who placed less stress on heredity and more on environment replaced the old leadership of the American Eugenics Society in the 1930s. Osborn said in 1937: "The question I want light on is how the spread of contraception can be carried on in such a way that it will give opportunities for contraceptive practice to those families who shouldn't have children without indoctrinating too much those families who should have more children?" Ideally, eugenicists would decide who should and who should not practice contraception. Osborn was anxious to cooperate with birth control advocates in spreading contraception among the poor, but he insisted that greater emphasis be placed on "positive" eugenics: "birth control" should be replaced by "family planning" and encouragement of large families for those who could afford them (Reed 1983:213, 136). Policing yet another boundary, Osborn also convinced Margaret Sanger to withdraw as a candidate for vice president of the Population Association of America, arguing that it should be a "scientific" organization (Notestein 1982:660).

In accepting voluntary birth control as a eugenic strategy, eugenicists themselves then ceded ground on both negative and positive eugenics. At that time sterilization was the only method by which to address directly the inheritance of dysgenic qualities. Moreover, eugenicists had to acknowledge the failure of "positive" eugenics. In short, eugenicists accepted birth control and population control because they had no other activist choices.^[23] Voluntarism rather than state compulsion seemed more likely to succeed in reducing the numbers of the "unfit." There was even talk of combining the ABC League and the American Eugenics Society (McCann 1994:181).

Neo-Malthusianism was the name used early in the twentieth century for the social and academic movement of those concerned with overpopulation, both numerically and proportionally by social class, who also supported birth control. As noted earlier, the term Malthusian was also used synonymously with what we now call birth control (as in Foucault's Malthusian couple). By 1940, neo-Malthusians had moved successfully into the scientific study of population phenomena as a means of promoting social policy, developing an elaborate institutional infrastructure for their new discipline of demography. The list on page 57 contains some of the key organizations and events in the movement's development. Its rhetoric shifted from neo-Malthusianism to population research to population control and demography.^[24]

At the organizing meeting for the Population Association for the United

States in 1930, Dr. Henry Pratt Fairchild summed up its mission: "We are all convinced of the importance of having an association to consolidate the population interests of this country. ... [W]e are in a position to take up the phenomenon of population as one of the great factors of human welfare to be rationally manipulated, just as we manipulate the other factors in human relations."^[25] However, neo-Malthusian population scientists were not in accord on contraceptive advocacy. They debated effectiveness, costs, and accessibility. Many population scientists asserted a direct correlation between socioeconomic status and the ability to nurture children in ways that remain too familiar. Many advocates of population control through contraception were also deeply racist, targeting lower-class and poor people and racial/ethnic groups of color both in the United States and abroad.^[26]

The period from 1920 to 1940 constituted the "emergence" era of the population enterprise, which coalesced between about 1940 and 1965.^[27] The British movement, which was larger and stronger than the American during the 1920s, focused primarily on colonial populations. British-ruled India had the first government-sponsored birth control clinic in the world, opened in 1930 (Hartmann 1987/1995). In the United States, organizing efforts focused on the academy and the philanthropic foundations. United States possessions were also the focus of birth control/population control programs; in the 1930s, a major program was established in Puerto Rico focusing on diaphragms, spermicides, and surgical sterilization (Ramirez de Arellano and Seipp 1983). This network was later enrolled to serve as the home base for testing the birth control pill prior to its approval for U.S. distribution (Oudshoorn 1994:122–37).

A number of reproductive and related scientists actively participated in the population establishment. For example, participants in the World Population Conference of 1927 included Leon Cole, C. C. Little, Adolph Meyer, Raymond Pearl, and J. Whitridge Williams (Hopkins gynecologist). Fellows and members of the Population Association of America included Little, Pearl, Dickinson (NCMH), L. B. Dunham (BSH), E. B. Wilson, Clark Wissler, and Robert Yerkes.^[28] Population concerns were raised in various media by these and a host of related organizations and demographers, generating wide cultural interest in population, and hence in reproductive issues more broadly.^[29] One of the key organizations in the present story is the Population Council, through which modern scientific IUDs (along with implantable hormonal contraceptives) were developed (Segal 1987), discussed next as a Rockefeller organization.