Critiques of the global-population-control campaign are numerous, and one might think that little remained to be said, but Matthew Connelly disproves this supposition. He exposes the failure, the arrogance, even the corruption of this ultimately destructive campaign and, remarkably, does so largely on the basis of its own documentation. He shows, particularly surprisingly, that the population controllers were often incompetent. His research within the papers of the main actors – including the World Bank, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the UN – produces a devastating exposé. Often uneducated about and disrespectful of different cultures, their agents sometimes tried to apply a standard, universal model across the board. They collected data on the basis of the same questionnaires, using the same wording to ask, for example, how often subjects had sex, in twenty-nine languages. Population control workers stayed in luxury hotel enclaves and met only with men, and occasionally women, of their class and international network. The infamous Khanna study revealed one of their failures vividly: interviews with 8,000 in the Punjab discovered that the women who received contraceptives had a higher birth rate after five years than those women who did not receive birth control. Moreover, while registering that baby girls died 50% more frequently than baby boys, the researchers did no investigation to find out why, although answers to this question would have shed light on the parents’ reproductive attitudes.

Connelly's new research corroborates in full the conclusions of previous critics. Between the foundations, the governments, and the UN, population controllers poured billions of dollars into the cause, and yet there is no evidence that it was responsible for a significant decline in fertility. In most of the world, fertility was declining even before the population-control programmes had any local impact, and declined even where there was little population-control effort. Connelly includes one particularly illuminating chart, comparing the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, showing that fertility fell as radically in countries with little population control effort (such as Brazil and Algeria) as in those with major campaigns (such as India and Indonesia). The population controllers’ hopes that lowering fertility would create economic growth were not borne out and more evidence supports the opposite claim – that economic development, when it is not confined to an elite, creates lower birth rates. Of equal importance, lowered fertility is no panacea for saving the world's resources. The old Malthusian model – that overpopulation would be periodically reduced by inevitable famine and epidemic – assumed that fewer people meant lower consumption. Malthus wrote, obviously, before the explosive technological and commercial developments of the last two centuries. We now know that rich countries with low birth rates consume far more of the world's energy and cause far more of its pollution and global warming than regions with higher birth rates.

Population control does seem to have lowered fertility when it was heavily coercive, as in India and, above all, China. But that coercion, besides its immorality, produced anger and recalcitrance. The coercion – and in some cases the motives behind it – sowed suspicion about birth control itself, the US providing an important example. Connelly mentions only briefly the extensive campaign to reduce ‘non-white’ fertility in the US, targeting African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and particularly American Indians, primarily through coercive sterilization. Eugenic racial justifications – ridding the population of the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘hereditarily degenerate’ – dominated in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by money-saving justification – ‘welfare mothers’ should not continue to have more babies – starting in the 1940s. One result was a conviction widespread among targeted populations that birth control itself was a racist and/or imperialist plot.

But that response came more from men than from women. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, anti-imperialists and feminists (myself included) condemned the US sterilization campaign in Puerto Rico without qualification. More recent scholars have shown that many Puerto Rican women were delighted with this birth control and sometimes valued it precisely because, since it was imposed, their husbands could not blame them for it. This does not justify coercive methods, but it shows that understanding population control's successes and failures requires analysis not only of international power relations but also of power relations within targeted communities, notably gendered relations.

Here Connelly's book falls short. His is almost exclusively a critique from within the population-control establishment. While it is impressive that he is able to mount such a strong critique from these internal sources, it is disappointing that he rarely looks outside the world of the population controllers into the reproductive and sexual culture and strategies of the targeted regions, communities, and families. In the interest of frank disclosure, I acknowledge that my brief 1976 critique of population control relied on the same method: tracing its continuity organizationally, financially, and in personnel from eugenics, imperialism, and neo-colonialism.Footnote ⁵ But that was thirty years ago, and since then scholars have produced more nuanced and complex approaches. Moreover, Connelly's insider critique makes this overlong book tedious to read. At times the reader feels that she is sitting through every executive committee meeting, presented with every internal memorandum, eyes drooping, and, as a result, missing the big picture.

Connelly is forthright in his support of reproduction control based on individual and particularly women's choice. He makes the point that fertility falls most reliably when women are educated, while population controllers, because of their eugenical commitment to reducing the population of the ‘inferior’ while increasing it among the ‘superior’, long considered the low fertility of educated women a problem, not an advance. But Connelly does not integrate the social, economic, and political context, and above all the power arrangements in which the objects of population control lived. In this respect, he replicates the continued concentration of reproduction research on collecting quantitative information, neglecting to look at harder-to-answer qualitative questions such as: What do large and small families mean for people's self-esteem and economic strategies? What allows men to overcome dislike, even disgust, for condoms? How do sexual partners negotiate birth control and safe sex? The lack of such research makes it hard to tell the whole story of population control. But there are studies of organized resistance to, as well as bottom-up promotion of, reproduction control. Today, a global women's movement with many transnational ties is making reproductive health a priority and its successes and failures need examination. Granted, in such a global study, Connelly could not possibly consider each local context, but certainly one or two places could have provided case studies.

Still, Connelly's insider view of population control provides an important corrective to earlier and simpler anti-imperialist analyses. While acknowledging the degree to which population control continued the impulses and goals of imperialism, Connelly rejects a conspiracy-theory approach by demonstrating the movement's varied and often contradictory motives. The population-control campaign brought together groups driven by racism, liberal modernization theory, health advocacy, and counter-insurgency. Connelly is right to emphasize that individual population controllers often had the best of motives, dreaming of world peace, world government, and so forth, but were constrained in a political, military, and funding universe organized from a position of domination. These relations are by no means of the past, as Connelly would certainly agree. They remain dominant in policies of trade and loan, toward the environment, drugs, and arms, and the ‘green revolution’. Nor is the male dominance that structures many women's reproductive options a phenomenon of the past – a dominance supported not only by local cultures but also by the same groups pushing reproduction control.