America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (6 page)

While Moore’s views were extreme, he was not alone. Pop- ular magazines pumped up the volume with headlines that announced, “Surging Population—An ‘Erupting Volcano,’” “An Overcrowded World?” “Asia’s ‘Boom’ in Babies,” “World Choice: Limit Population or Face Famine.” Articles also high- lighted the increasing American population, asking “Where Will U.S. Put 60 Million More People?” and “How the Pop- ulation Boom Will Change America.” Prophets of doom warned that “The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-Five Years Left.”
13

In spite of the alarms raised by the media, the U.S. govern- ment was initially reluctant to fund birth control efforts at home or abroad. Worries about alienating the Catholic Church, added to the aura of illegality and immorality that still surrounded contraception, kept investment in population control efforts at low levels. By the mid-1960s, however, the tide had turned. The widespread acceptance and use of the pill, along with increasing concerns about world population, had made contraception a legitimate subject for national pol- icy. President Lyndon Johnson placed population control at the center of his program for foreign aid as well as his domes- tic War on Poverty. The results were dramatic. Between 1965 and 1969 government funding for domestic family planning programs grew from $8.6 million to $56.3 million. During those same years, U.S. support for similar efforts in the devel- oping world grew from $2.1 million to $131.7 million.
14
Even Dwight D. Eisenhower changed his mind. In the mid-1960s he admitted, “Once as President, I thought and said that birth control was not the business of our federal government. The facts changed my mind. . . . Governments must act. . . . Fail- ure would limit the expectations of future generations to ab- ject poverty and suffering and bring down upon us history’s condemnation.”
15

Eisenhower’s change of heart indicates the extent to which expert and official opinion had accepted the imperative of pop- ulation control. As Edward Stockwell warned in his 1968 book
Population and People
, “Regardless of whether or not the ‘pop- ulation bomb’ represents a greater threat to the peace and se- curity of mankind than the hydrogen bomb . . . the inescapable

fact is that the rapid and accelerating rate of population growth in recent years has created an extremely dangerous situation in many parts of the world.”
16

Far more influential than Stockwell’s book was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller,
The Population Bomb
. Ehrlich warned that within a decade “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and predicted that a nuclear war would be fought over resources before the end of the twentieth century unless poverty in the developing world could be allevi- ated. But unlike the humanitarians who called for population control, Ehrlich’s warnings were tinged with disdain for the poor. He predicted that armies of poor people would “attempt to overwhelm us in order to get what they consider to be their fair share.”
17
Ehrlich clearly believed that
we
deserve our fair share, but
they
do not. Ehrlich did not represent the views of all advocates of population control. But he had a huge follow- ing. In the midst of social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, Ehrlich’s warnings struck a chord. His book sold 2 mil- lion copies by 1974.

Ehrlich was one of the founders of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), a movement that took shape in 1968.
18
In the spring of 1970,
Life
magazine ran a feature on ZPG, noting that the movement challenged the United States to stop growing. While cold war imperatives led some population planners to focus on the developing world, an entirely different group began advo- cating population control at home, motivated by environmental concerns. Gaining support among the young, especially on col- lege campuses, ZPG advocates called on Americans to limit the size of their families to two children as a way to keep the pop-

ulation stable. According to
Life
, ZPG called for abortion re- form, legalization of birth control, and changes in welfare reg- ulations and tax exemptions for children—a collection of policy initiatives that spanned the political spectrum.

The tactics of ZPG included street theater and other forms of grassroots activism. At the University of Pennsylvania, women students organized a “Lysistrata Day,” complete with toga costumes, in which they pledged “to avoid contact with men—for a day, at least.” (In Aristophanes’ play, the women refused sex until the men gave up war.)
Life
quoted Ehrlich, who had a vasectomy after fathering one child: “The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted chil- dren.” He warned that the “cancer of population growth . . . must be cut out.”
Life
retorted, “A certain cold and dispassion- ate cast of mind is required in order to regard the birth of human life not as a joyous event but as the proliferation of some deadly malignancy.”
19

Although
Life
bristled at the tone of the ZPG advocates, many other observers agreed that the American birthrate had to be brought under control. Concerns about overpopulation in the United States differed from those expressed about the same phenomenon in the developing world. As the focus of concern in poor countries, the problems appeared dire: more poverty, starvation, disease, and political turmoil—leading to massive suffering as well as wars and possible communist takeover. By contrast, overpopulation in the United States and other Western countries might entail discomfort, psychological distress, crime, and social unrest. In 1970
Ladies Home Journal
ran an article by British scientist Gordon Rattray Taylor arguing

that overpopulation in cities creates stress that “scars our minds and bodies” and leads to higher rates of crime, disease, and mental disturbances. Taylor quoted Dr. Paul Leyhausen, “a leading German ethologist,” who asserted, “What every nor- mal man wants for himself and his family is a detached house in an adequate garden, with neighbors close enough to be found if needed, or if one feels like a social call, yet far enough away to be avoided at other times.”
20
By these standards, only affluent suburbanites were “normal.”

While the experts whose thoughts appeared
in the
Ladies Home Journal
presumed that everyone could af- ford a single-family home in the suburbs if there was enough open space, others worried about the economic effects of over- population.
21
Some arguments for domestic population control carried explicitly racial overtones. An expert quoted in
Esquire
said that population growth in the United States will “greatly increase the magnitude of juvenile delinquency, exacerbate al- ready dangerous race tensions, inundate the secondary schools and colleges . . . and further subvert the traditional American Government system. . . . In Washington ninety percent of the schoolchildren are Negro, in Manhattan seventy-five percent are Negro or Puerto Rican—indicating the future city popu- lation.” Warning of high unemployment and frustration for urban blacks, the author predicted that “the crowd, or the mob, seems likely to reappear as a force in politics.” Referring to the 1965 riots in the mostly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, the author concluded ominously, “Watts was a prelude.”
22

While some feared the eruption of urban violence, others re- sented the cost to society of the high birthrate of the poor. Al- though the majority of poor people were white, minorities were overrepresented on welfare rolls. Opponents of the welfare state complained that taxpayers were supporting the children of the poor and wanted to curb their fertility. Some proponents of birth control for the poor, like eugenicist Clarence J. Gamble, encouraged inexpensive contraceptives as well as sterilization for poor women.
23
These efforts had eugenic and racial over- tones both in the United States and overseas. Concerns about the proliferation of nonwhite people fueled public policies en- couraging poor people of color to curb their fertility, some- times coercing them to do so.

At the same time, contraception was “a great thing for poor folks,” in the words of one African American woman. But poor women were rarely able to gain access to these technolo- gies on their own terms.
24
Regardless of the motives of advo- cates, poor women took advantage of whatever contraceptive services were available to them. Some wanted sterilization; others resisted it. Some eagerly sought to be part of clinical tri- als of oral contraceptives; others rejected the idea of being “human guinea pigs.” Proponents and activists often disagreed on which women should have access and what contraceptive options should be offered.
25

Women of color were justifiably dubious of the motives of family planning advocates. Black women in particular had reasons to be distrustful after centuries of manipulation of their fertility, beginning with slave breeding. Well into the late twentieth century, black women were subjected to forced

sterilizations. Nevertheless, many were as eager for birth con- trol as their white counterparts.
Ebony
assured its readers that contraception helped parents “space babies to make them a blessing rather than a burden.”
26
Tensions remained between the desire for access to contraception and suspicions of the motives of birth controllers.

Margaret Sanger exemplified this tension between choice and coercion. There is no doubt that her early radicalism faded in the service of more conservative and eugenic rationales for contraception, as the birth control movement shifted to a more mainstream focus on family planning.
27
But Sanger’s interest in contraception for the poor characterized her efforts from the very beginning. In 1938, she turned her attention to a “Negro Project.” The proposal stated, “The mass of Negroes, particu- larly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least in- telligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.” For all the racist overtones of that statement, the words were not those of a white bigot: Sanger was quoting verbatim W. E. B. DuBois, the renowned African American civil rights leader. DuBois was concerned that among black Americans, those with the highest fertility rates had the fewest resources to pro- vide well for their families. Without access to contraception, he argued, they would be doomed to live in poverty.
28

Sanger wrote that her goal was “helping Negroes to control their birthrate, to reduce their high infant and maternal death rate, to maintain better standards of health and living for those already born, and to create better opportunities to help them-

selves, and to rise to their own heights through education and the principles of a democracy.”
29
Many birth controllers shared Sanger’s concerns. Although some were more interested in re- ducing the fertility of those they considered to be undesirable, coercive policies never took hold in the United States.

Yet when the pill arrived, some saw it as a potential tool of racist social engineers. In the late 1960s, male leaders of the Black Power movement charged that the pill promoted geno- cide, and they encouraged black women to refuse to take it. In 1967, a Black Power conference in Newark, New Jersey, orga- nized by writer and activist Amiri Baraka,
30
passed a resolution denouncing birth control. Even mainstream organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League backed away from their previous support of contraception. Marvin Dawes of the Florida NAACP asserted, “Our women need to produce more babies, not less . . . and until we comprise 30 to 35 percent of the population, we won’t really be able to affect the power structure in this country.”
31

Black women, however, resisted such claims. Although they were aware that some white proponents of the birth control pill and other forms of contraception hoped to reduce the numbers of black babies, they wanted the pill and saw it as es- sential to their reproductive freedom. In 1970, writer and ac- tivist Toni Cade responded to the male Black Power leaders by asking, “What plans do you have for the care of me and the child?” Frances Beal, head of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Com- mittee (SNCC), insisted, “Black women have the right and the responsibility to determine when it is in
the interest of the

struggle to have children or not to have them and this right must not be relinquished to any
. . . to determine when it is in
her own best interests
to have children.”
32

The conflict between women and men in the movement went beyond rhetoric. In Pittsburgh, William “Bouie” Haden, leader of the United Movement for Progress, threatened to firebomb a clinic. In Cleveland, a family planning center in a black neighborhood burned to the ground after accusations of “black genocide.” Meanwhile, black female leaders like Con- gresswoman Shirley Chisholm pushed for increased access to birth control. A 1970 study found that 80 percent of black women in Chicago approved of birth control and 75 percent were using contraception.
33

Lack of access to reproductive health care remained a seri- ous problem for poor women, whether black or white. A study by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) found that only 850,000 out of 5.3 million poor women in the United States received family planning services, and most of them were white.
The Nation
observed in 1969, “Caught in the middle is the indigent American woman who wishes to have the same freedom to choose sex without conception that her middle-class counterpart enjoys.”
34

Proponents of population control encountered ambivalent reactions from the people they hoped to reach. Women eagerly sought birth control wherever it was available. But their mo- tives were
personal
. They used contraceptives to control their own fertility, not to control world population. Officials from governments at the receiving end of international family plan- ning efforts did not necessarily agree that population control