Unnatural increase? A short history of population trends and influences.

• Author: Engelman, Robert
• Position: POPULATION FORUM

From at least the Axial Age (800-200 BCE) until the late eighteenth century, most organized efforts to influence the size of populations aimed at boosting it. Women have been extolled, pressured, or coerced into having children early and often, whether or not they would have timed their own childbearing that way if left to their own devices (contraceptive or otherwise). But let's consider for a moment the strategies that have gained the greater attention since the time of Thomas Robert Malthus: the kind designed to slow demographic growth by reducing family size and birthrates.

The first true promoter of actually acting on population issues appears to have been Francis Place, a self-educated son of the English working class. Married at age 19 to a woman two years his junior, Place fathered 15 children and lived in poverty. In late middle age he became the world's first birth control theorist and propagandist. In an 1822 book on Malthus's population principle, Place proposed substituting contraception for late marriage to moderate birthrates. Not content to let the book plead his case, the author wandered the streets of London and northern English industrial cities, posting anonymous handbills arguing that large families risked the health of mothers and children, caused economic anxiety and suffering, and led to low wages because large cohorts of workers flooded labor markets. If couples would just use the sponge. Place suggested, they could solve these problems. Place also stressed a value that underlies mainstream population policies up to the present: control of births not by government or other outsiders, but by women and couples themselves, "so that none need to have more [children] than they wish to have."

Not surprisingly, civic groups and civil authorities challenged many nineteenth-century writers on population as purveyors of indecency. The tracts and books were, after all, discussing sexual intercourse. In the late 1870s, procontraception activist Annie Besant and attorney Charles Bradlaugh published Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy for the British market and were quickly charged with spreading obscenity. Their trial turned into a publicity bonanza for birth control. Prosecutor Hardinge Gifford called Fruits "a dirty, filthy book" and added that "no decently educated British husband would allow even his wife to have it. The object of it is to enable a person to have sexual intercourse, and not to have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result of that sexual intercourse." Besant and Bradlaugh were convicted and sentenced to six months in jail, but the verdict was reversed on appeal. That judgment effectively ended contraception's legal status as obscene in the United Kingdom. Sales of books on contraception soared into the hundreds of thousands throughout Europe and North America. The Besant-Bradlaugh trial helped launch a slowing of demographic growth within England and Wales that continued for decades. Births peaked around the time of the trial at about 35 per 1,000 people per year and then slid down a steady slope to 17 per 1,000 per year by the 1930s.

Not only in England but in several European countries and as far away as Brazil and Cuba, organizations calling themselves Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian Leagues sprang up in the early 1880s to promote wider use of contraception. In Germany, physician Wilhelm Mensinga developed a hollow half hemisphere of rubber with a watch spring threaded around its rim to hold it over the cervix. This device, soon known as the diaphragm, was easier to use and more effective than anything then available. In the Netherlands, the country's first woman physician, Aletta Jacobs, established centers for instructing midwives in how to teach contraceptive methods to women in their homes. The need for such instruction is an ironic indicator of the folk wisdom that midwives must have lost since the Middle Ages--including, perhaps, the memory of their predecessors' persecution in the witch trials. Nonetheless, with Dr. Jacobs's medical supervision as a defining feature, these centers mark the origin of reproductive health education and provision as practiced today.

Variable Winds

Across the Atlantic, the winds of change blew in the opposite direction. In a uniquely American development, a Protestant moral arbiter named Anthony Comstock crusaded for laws to criminalize as obscene the advertising and sale of contraceptives. A receptive U.S. Congress in 1873 rushed through passage of what came to be known as the Comstock Act to accomplish these objectives. For the District of Columbia and federal territories, the act banned even the possession of contraceptives. Comstock himself was deputized as a special agent of the Post Office Department, authorized to inspect suspicious mailings and to make arrests. State laws along the same lines as the federal one soon followed and, in some northeastern states where the Catholic Church wielded political influence, legislatures prohibited physicians from prescribing or even advising on contraception.

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Comstock was virtually a caricature of the male moralist, righteously determining that women should bear all the children whom God and their husbands sent their way. But his nemesis appeared within a few decades. Margaret Sanger was driven just as powerfully by the opposite idea: that women should determine for themselves if and when to have children, based not on abstinence but on birth control. Earlier and more energetically than any other single individual, she honed and promoted the idea that women freely choosing when to become pregnant would improve not only their own lives, but humanity itself. That conviction led her to the conclusion that the spread of birth control would slow or end world population growth--and also that it could improve the genetic quality of the human species. In this complex and ambiguous legacy, she represents to some extent the equally complex and ambiguous history of modern population policy itself.

Trained as a nurse, Sanger worked with immigrant women on New York's Lower East Side and witnessed the impacts of unplanned childbearing and unsafe abortion. Thus began Sanger's lifelong commitment to make birth control--two words she was the first to link together, in her monthly newspaper The Woman Rebel--available to any woman who wanted to use it. By 1916, after visiting clinics in the Netherlands, the descendants of Aletta Jacobs's training centers, Sanger had set up the first birth control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Though she spent...