From baby boom to birth dearth: an interpretation of the population control movement and its political discourse since 1945 in the United States

Abstract

This thesis investigates and interprets the origins and political discourses of the post World War II population movement in the United States. It argues that this movement, in part, was artificially created by members of the upper social class. Its most important representatives were the founder of the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III and the owner of the Dixie Cup Company, Hugh Moore. Reasons for their interest in population control can be found in their concern for the national security of the United States which, they believed, was challenged by Communist expansion. Equally important was their attempt to perpetuate their upper-class privileges by ensuring the continuation of the existing political and social order in the United States. The ideology employed was "overpopulation." But while the image was overcrowding, it was not the industrialized, densely populated countries that were accused of being overpopulated but rather the poor, underdeveloped, often sparsely populated nations in the Third World. Or, similarly, the poor in the US were accused of being the main cause of all kinds of social ills. As poor countries had a higher population growth rate and as poor people tended to have more children than rich people, the poor were the main target of population control.

This study, then, shows how pronatalism and antinatalism, the two variants of the population movement, capitalized on the political and social setting of their time in the United States. Although the antinatalists' apparent goal was population control in general, the poor were their main target while the wealthy population, as supporters of American values, did not have to be controlled in number. Similarly, the pronatalists seemingly desired to increase US birth rates, but mainly addressed the more privileged portions of the American population. The attitude toward the poor, and here explicitly toward the Third World, remained antinatalist.