"Population" is a Code Word for "Eugenics"

Apparently the world's population has reached or will soon reach 7 billion people. Concern about the world's population and its growth has a long history, and it is very much intertwined with eugenics movements, to the extent that the two concerns cannot be considered as independent matters.

A CNN headline today read: "7 Billion Reasons to Empower Women." The article was about contraception. This was about as unsurprising to me as the sun rising, for the reason that contraception is also deeply interlinked with the eugenics/population control movement.

[For some interesting reading, you can consult:
Sex, Race & Science:  Eugenics in the Deep South by Edward Larson
Killing the Black Body:  Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
Building a Better Race:  Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline
Reproducing Empire:  Race, Sex, Science & U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs]

Fears about unfettered population growth were deliberately created and exploited in an attempt to legitimize efforts at reproductive control. (There actually is no ironclad reason to believe that population growth is a threat.) And, as much as white feminists might protest, curbing reproduction has had far less to do with "empowering women" than it has with reducing the number of people of color on this planet.

Margaret Sanger, the feminist icon who most famously championed birth control as a means of "empowering women," was also an avowed eugenicist who supported the involuntary imposition of birth control on women of color.

In fact, women of color in the U.S. and abroad have been subject to all sorts of infringements upon their rights (reproductive and otherwise) in the name of "women's empowerment." For example, Puerto Rican women were used against their will and/or knowledge to test new birth control methods with uncomfortable, potentially dangerous, side effects.

For many women of color, reproductive rights means the ability to reproduce if they want to.

One of many things that bothers me about CNN's headline ("7 Billion Reasons to Empower Women") is that, grammatically, women are the subjects who are acted upon by someone else.  Some other agent is empowering them. (I am pretty sure women can empower themselves.)  More specifically, though, it appears to be a call for the "developed" (in this case read:  white) world, including white feminists, to empower all those other women in the world (who are apparently too stupid to know how to take care of themselves and their families). Shockingly, women of color are just as capable of empowering themselves, without the benevolent aid of white women. Furthermore, it is an even bigger and more dangerous mistake to suppose that contraception equals empowerment. For a majority of women in the world this is not the case. In fact, the refusal of contraception itself could be seen as an act of empowerment.

Could we allow women around the world to empower themselves by letting them use their reproductive capacities as they wish? (And we, of course, would view it as "letting them," because we always have ultimate power.)

One may argue that even if population growth and contraception were initially associated with eugenics movements, that does not mean they aren't relevant concerns that might validly be considered independent of eugenics today. Surely eugenics is an outdated topic.

Unfortunately, eugenics is not outdated. The ideas have persisted and the acts have continued, albeit with less fanfare. (Only recently I linked to an article about a not-too-long-ago victim of eugenics in the United States.) It is a mistake to think that eugenics is a concern of the past. More importantly, population growth and contraception can't be considered independently of eugenics. The terms and principles were born within a eugencist framework and are eugenicist through and through. The very idea that the human population can be managed through technically advised control of reproduction? That is eugenics, by definition.

Moreover, pretending that population/contraception concerns can be separated from eugenics allows people to continue eugenicist projects under more benign guises. For example, the Ford Foundation can employ rhetoric about population control that is divorced from eugenics - even more, implement real projects, affecting masses of people around the world, based on this rhetoric - so that they can claim that their prime concern is actually "economic development" in the Third World. But it is not too difficult to pull back the mask and reveal the clearly racist bent of the Ford Foundation in general, across all of its projects.

To suggest that population/contraception can be considered independently of eugenics is in many ways to claim that racism does not exist anymore.