From Malthus to Mifepristone: A Primer on the Population Control Movement
This important new book offers unique and extensive coverage of the political economy of the abortion, contraception, and sterilisation industries; and of the efforts of governments and elites to bring on sweeping changes in sexual and reproductive behaviour.
Part One of ‘From Malthus to Mifepristone: A Primer on the Population Control Movement’ provides a history of the population control movement from 1798 to 1998. Proper focus is given to the eugenicist, racist and economic motivations of the elite groups driving and funding population control.
Part Two profiles the leading organisations of the modern population control movement.
Particular attention is given to the funding of the modern abortion-contraception-sterilisation complex.
Academic Demography and Population Control
The 7,000 universities found in Western Europe and the English-speaking world host hundreds of thousands of faculties, departments, colleges, schools, institutes, etc. collectively catering to 40 million full-time students.
Many academic disciplines aid and abet population control: Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, and the wide array of Ecology, Enviro-Science, and Conservation Biology faculties. To these must be added the Gynecology-related departments within medical colleges and the archipelago of on-campus facilities researching pharmaceutical contraceptives and abortifacients. A cursory accounting of these academic nodes would fill a thick directory requiring regular update.
One lesser academic niche dovetailing smoothly with population control is Ecological Economics. This branch of the humanities is an established presence across Western campuses. Practitioners gird their calls for uber-regulatory corporatist economic policies with unshakeable maxims about limits to growth. Small well-funded cliques such as the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy declare zero population growth to be a prerequisite for the sustainable economy. They are not a dominating academic force, but the fact that the International Society for Ecological Economics now has ten regional federations indicates clout and cohesion. Honed and refreshed sermons on Ecological Economics are preached daily to tens of thousands of impressionable students.
Historically, the branch of science most akin to population control has been Demography. Pioneering institutions like Princeton’s Office of Population Research (est. 1936) were population control movement inventions, wholly absorbed in the Cause. Latter day movement saints like Judith Blake (who founded Berkeley’s Demography Department in 1969) engaged in population control activism for their entire careers and unblinkingly presumed Demography to be a movement instrumentality.
Mobilizing elite and public opinion around “overpopulation” requires authoritative sounding research. Demographers provide this. Effective fertility suppression requires professional statistical analysis of the number of babies being born in a given area and of the precise social cohorts making those babies. Demographers provide this as well. Demographers keep a keen eye on abortion rates, contraceptive use, high fertility remnants, and on those ethnic and socioeconomic cohorts consciously resisting the population control agenda. Much modern marketing, consumer research, election analysis, public opinion polling, and census data mining has its roots in population control orientated Demography.
Over the decades Academic Demography (now often called Population Studies) branched into many fields only tangentially related to population control. Over the same period demographers cultivated alternative commercial and political patrons. Despite this, Demography never forsook its movement origins.
Of the 42 members of the Association of Population Centers (APC, est. 1991), nine are obvious movement fortresses (Office of Population Research, Berkeley Population Center, Population Council, Guttmacher Institute, RAND’s Population Research Center, Center for Demography and Ecology, Hopkins Population Center, Harvard’s Center for Population and Development Studies and The Center for Demography Studies and Ecology). APC’s other 33 members sport banal academic monikers but work in close cooperation with, and share the objectives and tasks of, their more obviously movement-angled associates. Many philanthropies that give generously to population control also give generously to demographic research.
Harvard’s contribution to Demography illustrates both the evolution and the scale of the movement-academic interface. Their Center for Population and Development Studies employs 69 faculty members, 18 administrative and research staff, 12 post-docs, and 21 graduate student affiliates. While the Center is dedicated to examining the challenges of population growth, their demographic research, however, is not concentrated on fertility but rather on the problems of an aging population. At the same time, Harvard’s Department of Global Health and Population (GHP), which is not an APC member, employs 72 faculty, 148 researchers, and 85 staff.
GHP emphasizes traditional population control topics related to fertility suppression and, of course, to sexual and reproductive rights. GHP is still studying the effects of their extensive joint venture with the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics aimed at promoting post-partum intrauterine devices in Asia and Africa. GHP’s Contraceptive Autonomy project is funded by the Packard Foundation and aims to increase contraceptive usage through better dialogue with women. A separate “generous” grant from the Packard Foundation funds a program titled: “Enhancing Measurement of the Quality of Contraceptive Counselling.” Additional GHP research develops metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of maternal health and sexually transmitted disease interventions.
The European equivalent of APC, Population Europe, is a partnership of 25 European demographic research centers. Population Europe was founded in 2009 and is hosted by the Berlin-based Max Planck Society. Partners include the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Oxford’s Population Centre, the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, and 19 other institutes from across Europe – usually adjuncts to major universities. Population Europe is buttressed by the individual-member-accommodating European Association of Population Studies, much in the same manner as APC is buttressed by the still quite political 3,000-member Population Association of America.
Such facilities exist elsewhere. The International Institute for Population Sciences was founded in India in 1956 to facilitate that country’s notoriously coercive “family planning” programs. They are presently a demographic research and training facility with 40 full-time professors. Funding comes from the Indian government, the UN, and from Tata Trusts.
Much Demography is subsumed within semi-autonomous research centres and think-tanks. For example, the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) employs hundreds of researchers across its ecological, environmental, and climate departments. (IIASA employs ten IPCC Fifth Assessment authors.) IIASA’s $40 million budget is drawn mainly from several European governments.
IIASA’s World Population Department employs 32 scholars. Department boss, Wolfgang Lutz, is also the founding director of the 80-employee Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, and he is the head science director of the Vienna Institute of Demography. Lutz’s specialties are fertility rate analysis and assessing environmental impacts of population growth. He has authored or co-authored 28 books and 250 peer-reviewed papers on said topics. Lutz has been selected by the UN Secretary-General to co-author the next UN Global Sustainable Development Report.
The Urban Institute does not want to appear to be an activist affair; that would be counterproductive. To serve their patrons, Urban Institute scholars must appear to be unbiased professional researchers. The Institute’s 500 statisticians, demographers, sociologists, and “data scientists” research a range of topics, but Health, Population, and Gender and Sexuality predominate. Their archives contain thousands of reports and articles on birth control and family planning. They also do much research and analysis on the effectiveness of non-profit societies and philanthropic foundations.
Given that much of the Urban Institute’s efforts go toward helping clients communicate their message, it is interesting to see Donald Baer seated prominently on the Institute’s Board of Trustees. Baer is Chair and CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest public relations firms – a firm whose Healthcare subdivision works diligently for Big Pharma. Baer is also Chair of PBS and sits on the board of the Meredith media conglomerate. He was Bill Clinton’s speechwriter.
The Paris-headquartered International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) dates to 1928. Its founding fathers were openly fascist. IUSSP’s current annual budget of $1.5 million comes from the Hewlett Foundation, French Government, UNFPA, University of Paris’s Population and Development Research Centre (CEPED), Guttmacher Institute, and Population Council. IUSSP has special consultative status with the UN’s ECOSOC.
Due to its physical proximity to IUSSP headquarters, the University of Paris’s CEPED has, since its founding in the early 1980s, played an oversized role in IUSSP. CEPED’s 150 employees (91 Ph.D. and Ph.D. candidates) concentrate much of their energies on analyzing how the dissemination of modern contraceptive technology disrupts traditional reproductive and kinship patterns in the Global South. IUSSP President, Professor Tom Legrand of Montreal, is a specialist on sub-Saharan African and Caribbean fertility rates.
IUSSP hosts a few dozen seminars annually that cumulatively attract about a thousand academics. Every four years IUSSP holds a major international confab. Their 2017 conference in Cape Town attracted 1,900 population scientists. Of the 4,000 papers submitted to conference organizers, 433 dealt with “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
Academic Demography performs an integrating function within the population control movement. Foreign aid bureaucracies, government service contractors and philanthropic foundations hire many Demography school graduates who go on to spend their entire careers within movement institutions. These same bureaucracies, companies, and foundations also contract Demography departments to do statistical research. Professionals employed by Academic Demography departments engage in open population control advocacy. Demography continues to be a movement toolbox.
The above is an excerpt. The full Kindle version of this new book can be purchased for only $3.99 at: www.amazon.com
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