America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation by Elaine Tyler May Read Free Book Online Page B

drive to conquer the earth.” 12
    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