President Trump’s recent actions have dramatically reduced US taxpayers’ financial support for worldwide population control efforts. First, he reinstated the Mexico City Policy, or the “Global Gag Rule,” which prevents the use of federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortion procedures overseas. Weeks later, he took action to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which for decades has provided funding to international “family planning” NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council.
Trump’s administrative shifts also cut US funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which laid crucial groundwork for China’s infamous one-child policy and other draconian population policies in developing countries, including coercive abortions and involuntary sterilizations.
Most recently, the Trump administration announced plans to freeze millions of dollars in federal grants to family planning organizations such as Planned Parenthood while investigating whether these subsidies were used for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) efforts.
The UNFPA, the IPPF, and the Population Council advertise themselves as champions of women’s rights and reproductive freedom and choice, but their missions were historically (and are) committed to far less noble ideals: controlling the world’s population.
Headlines detailing the absurd progressive causes funded by USAID abound, but a brief history of USAID’s involvement in this broader web of population control organizations and activities is necessary — and serves as further justification for their defunding or dissolution.
Eugenics Reborn
In the post-war era, a network of powerful US government agencies and NGOs launched a coordinated global campaign to reduce fertility, particularly in developing countries, based on neo-Malthusian concerns about population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. Many of the key individuals involved, such as Margaret Sanger and Frederick Osborn, were heavy hitters in the eugenics movement, which had lost its moral and scientific credibility after the Nuremberg Trials.
The horrors of the Holocaust were enough to discredit eugenics in the minds of most Americans, but some elite crusaders waging war against the “unfit” were unwilling to abandon their collectivist beliefs, especially the Malthusian presuppositions which undergirded them.
In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III hosted an invitation-only meeting at Colonial Williamsburg to discuss the population “problem” with leading demographers and population scientists. The primary-sourced details of this meeting are documented in Columbia historian Matthew Connelly’s book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.
Several attendees discussed the possibility of withholding industrial development from poor, agrarian countries like India. Detlev Bronk, then-president of Johns Hopkins University, expressed concern about “the potential degradation of the genetic quality of the human race.”
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Director William Vogt mentioned that population control programs “can be sold on the basis of the mother’s health and the health of the other children,” and that “there will be no trouble getting into foreign countries on that basis.”
Following the Colonial Williamsburg meeting, the Population Council was established, with Rockefeller serving as its first president. The original draft of its mission statement expressed eugenic zeal for a world where “parents who are above the average in intelligence, quality of personality and affection will tend to have larger than average families.”
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) was founded three weeks later in 1952 at a conference in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), India, under the leadership of Margaret Sanger. In a letter to a birth control philanthropist two years before the IPPF was founded, Sanger candidly revealed her eugenic views:
I believe that now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.
Sanger’s vice chair at the IPPF, and drafter of its constitution, was Carlos Blacker, the former secretary of the British Eugenics Society. In a 1957 memorandum, he suggested that the British Eugenics Society should “pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics.”
American Eugenics Society (AES) co-founder and director Frederick Osborn, a long-time friend of Blacker, succeeded Rockefeller as Population Council president in 1957. Osborn shared Blacker’s conviction in a reformed eugenics, arguing that “if eugenics is to make any progress in the foreseeable future, we will not only have to drop the idea of assigning genetic superiorities to social or racial groups, but we will even have to stop trying to designate individuals as superior or inferior.”
Thus, eugenics was reborn, but re-emerged by stealth and advanced its aims through “less obvious means.” Family planning programs would no longer openly humiliate the populations targeted for genetic elimination, but rather convince them that smaller families were to their own benefit.
“Family Planning” — Voluntary and Coercive
During the Eisenhower administration, the US foreign policy establishment became increasingly concerned about the alleged national security threat of population growth in the developing world. By 1959, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that aid be given to “developing countries who establish programs that check population growth.”
In 1961, the Kennedy administration established USAID, and Planned Parenthood was assured that “population was now AID’s Number One problem.” JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared before the United Nations that “less than five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” His administration’s policies made US economic assistance contingent upon countries’ willingness to enact population control policies. USAID officials were ordered “to exert the maximum leverage and influence” to ensure governments were constraining population growth.
USAID subsidies for family planning increased by a factor of 25 between 1965 and 1969. The Population Council and the IPPF were both recipients of generous USAID grants.
Then, in the February 1969 issue of the Population Council’s journal Family Planning Perspectives, Population Council President Bernard Berelson agreed on the necessity of moving “beyond family planning” as voluntary programs were “not enough” to “quickly and substantially” lower birth rates.
Population control proposals “beyond family planning” consisted of measures for “involuntary fertility control,” including the “addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” “marketable licenses to have children,” “temporary sterilization of all girls via time-capsule contraceptives,” and “compulsory sterilization of men with three or more living children.”
That same year, Planned Parenthood Federation sent a memorandum to Berelson proposing measures to decrease fertility in the United States. In addition to “social constraints” on marriage and childbearing, the memo suggested efforts to “encourage increased homosexuality,” “encourage women to work,” and “discourage private homeownership.”
Involuntary methods included “fertility control agents in water supply” and “compulsory sterilization of all who have two children except for a few who would be allowed three.” In 1969, abortion remained illegal in the United States, but “abortion and sterilization on demand” and “compulsory abortion of out-of-wedlock pregnancies” were included in Planned Parenthood’s memorandum on domestic population control.
A Colorful UN Force
Neo-Malthusians often feared that US government-sponsored population control measures directed at developing countries would generate significant controversy, such as accusations of imperialism and genocide.
Bernard Berelson noted that US-backed population control in developing countries “seems more likely to generate political opposition abroad than acceptance.” However, the “proposal to create an international super-agency seems more likely of success.”
A plan was orchestrated to disguise global population control efforts under the auspices of the United Nations, which could subsidize population NGOs such as the IPPF without the appearance of serving American interests, even as US taxpayers continued to foot the bill.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) President Alan Guttmacher said, “If the United States goes to the black man or the yellow man and says ‘slow down your reproductive rate,’ we’re immediately suspected of having ulterior motives to keep the white man dominant in the world. If you can send in a colorful UN force, you’ve got much better leverage.”
In 1969, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was established, which is today known as the United Nations Population Fund. According to Connelly, the UNFPA operated independently and was not beholden to member countries. With Rockefeller calling many of the shots, US funding was channeled through USAID to the UNFPA, then dispersed to NGOs such as the IPPF operating on the ground in various countries.
In 1974, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger collaborated with the CIA and USAID to produce the classified National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), arguing that suppressing developing countries’ populations was necessary for US national security and economic interests. Kissinger recommended that these population activities (including IUDs, sterilizations, payments to encourage abortion, and “indoctrination” of young people) should be carried out in partnership with the UNFPA, the WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank — and contemplated withholding food aid to countries that refused to implement family planning programs.
Just a few years later, the UNFPA donated $50 million to support China’s one-child policy, which terrorized the Chinese population with forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations for over three decades. In 1983 alone, 16 million Chinese women were sterilized, and 4 million men received vasectomies. All couples with two or more children were required to undergo sterilization.
Similar horrors played out in India in the 1970s and 1980s, where sterilization was sometimes required for access to water, ration cards, and health care. In 1975, over 8 million men and women were sterilized. The World Bank funded the Indian sterilization campaign with a $66 million grant.
A Sea Change
The Mexico City Policy, colloquially called the “Global Gag Rule” has been instated, rescinded, and reinstated by subsequent administrations along party lines since the Reagan Administration.
During the Biden administration, the UNFPA re-welcomed the United States as a major contributing partner to “the largest procurers of contraceptives in the world.”
The new Trump administration not only followed the Republican tradition of defunding the UNFPA and population control NGOs, but has taken an extra step by moving to shut down USAID.
USAID, the UNFPA, and their affiliated NGOs have legacies tainted by sponsorship of coercive anti-natal policies that violated the inherent dignity and rights of people worldwide.
As fertility rates decline to sub-replacement levels, the US government should cease funding all population activities that endeavor, either subtly or implicitly, to drive down birth rates.
Their neo-Malthusian agenda, subsidized by US taxpayer money, was predicated on a eugenic, misanthropic, and economically fallacious view of human nature and human beings’ relationship with the natural world. Whatever the fears of the 1960s and 1970s neo-Malthusians, the fruits of population growth were not famines, diseases, or resource scarcity, but a superabundant age of prosperity, innovation, and lower prices. A combination of population growth and economic freedom lifted billions out of poverty and improved the health and well-being of all.