The pro-death crowd just changes its reasoning as popular culture demands.
Since the end of Second World War, the population-control lobby has carefully presented itself as a benevolent and technocratic movement. It understands that it can no longer publicly air racial concerns about ‘unfit people’. In 1952, William Vogt, a leading figure in the postwar Malthusian movement in America, told his colleagues that ‘it is commonly said in the Orient what we want to cut their population because we are afraid of them’. Yet he insisted that the programme of population control ‘can be sold on the basis of the mother’s health and health of the other children’, and ‘there will be no trouble getting into foreign countries on that basis’. Fatal Misconception provides numerous examples of how the population-control lobby sought to package its mission as an innocuous public health initiative.
Connelly’s book is an excellent work of reference on the history of the population-control movement. It is based on a rigorous and scholarly exploration of key archival sources, and it gives important insights into the emergence and the workings of the population-control lobby. In essence, this is a story about a small group of energetic and determined crusaders who, through their network of contacts, gained significant influence over governments and international organisations. The Malthusian cause has never let principle stand in the way of an opportunity; it has continually redefined its image in order to win favour with the public. In the past 60 years, it has presented population control as a poverty-reduction measure, a ‘development policy’, an instrument of family planning, a precondition for improving the position of women, a way of giving more choice to families, and, more recently, as a necessary measure to save the environment and the planet.
Go to Pandagon and you'll witness Amanda Marcotte making feminist and environmentalist arguments for wanting to stop people from having the number of children they want.
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