Starred Review. Passionate and troubling, this study by Columbia University historian Connelly (
A Diplomatic Revolution) tells the story of the 20th-century international movement to control population, which he sees as an oppressive movement that failed to deliver the promised economic and environmental results. According to Connelly, some proponents of the movement thought it was the key to women's health and well-being; others saw it as a way to eliminate the poor population; still others believed it would protect the environment. But Connelly also shows how larger economic and social contexts shaped the movement. For example, during the 1930s international Depression, ordinary people increasingly felt that couples planning families should focus on financial considerations; at the same time, as the state offered increased economic aid, it became acceptable to believe the state should also have a role in regulating reproduction. Far from disinterested, Connelly challenges many of the population control movement's claims: to those who argue that the slowed population growth in Asia has helped save the planet, Connelly notes tartly that if Asians have 2.1 children, but also air conditioning and automobiles, they will have a much greater impact on the global ecosystem than a billion more subsistence farmers. Ambitious, exhaustively researched and clearly written, this is a highly important book. 22 b&w illus.
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Passionate and troubling...Connelly tells the story of the 20th-century international movement to control population, which he sees as an oppressive movement that failed to deliver the promised economic and environmental results...Ambitious, exhaustively researched and clearly written, this is a highly important book. (
Publishers Weekly (starred review) 20080529)
[A] disturbing and compelling global history of population control programs...Drawing from records in more than 50 archives in seven countries, including those from Planned Parenthood and the more recently opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly provides extensive examples of movements to adjust populations...The world population growth is slowing and the age of population control appears to be over for the moment, but Connelly writes that his book is not just about history: It is a cautionary tale about the future. (Lori Valigra
Christian Science Monitor 20080524)
[A] voluminous history of global population policy. (Elizabeth Pisani
New Statesman 20080814)
Highlight[s] the importance of knowing who speaks for whom...
Fatal Misconception describes a historic clash of opposed interest groups wrestling to impose their own population policies on the developing world. (Michael Sargent
Nature 20081017)
Connelly's book is an excellent work of reference on the history of the population-control movement...It gives important insights into the emergence and the workings of the population-control lobby. (Frank Furedi
Spiked Review of Books 20080602)
The shocking theme of Connelly's book is how Western governments--and most especially successive U.S. administrations--supported a policy which would have appalled them if it had been imposed on their own families. (Dominic Lawson
The Independent 20081201)
A devastating account of the population-control movement; he demonstrates, detail by shocking detail, how a movement that believed it was acting from the highest humanitarian ideals became responsible for callous abuses of human rights on a global scale, ruining millions of lives in a grotesque eugenic experiment. (Dominic Lawson
Sunday Times )
Connelly decisively confronts the historical baggage of reproductive rights by detailing the confluence of social Darwinists, Malthusians, racist eugenicists, public health advocates and feminists who coalesced around the century-long effort to control world population. (James J. Hughes
Times Higher Education Supplement )
Mr. Connelly's story is a global one, partly because so many of the groups seeking to influence the reproduction of others were transnational, but also because often it was those in one country who wished those in another to have fewer children...Mr. Connelly's most devastating critique of population control is not that it destroyed lives, or was based on imperialist or eugenic ideas, but that it did not work. (
The Economist )
Though painful to read, [
Fatal Misconception] contain[s] many valuable lessons for anyone who cares about making development programs work, both technically and politically. (Helen Epstein
The New York Review of Books )
This book provides the best historical record yet of how our culture was shaped by the acceptance of birth control. (Patrick Carroll
Catholic Herald )
The subject of population control--perhaps the most ambitious social engineering project of the 20th century--has been somewhat neglected by historians...
Fatal Misconception is a welcome contribution to the field, original and thought-provoking. (Clive Cookson
Financial Times )
[This] brilliant new history of the population control movement is useful not simply on its theme but for the light it sheds on the political corruption that inevitably accompanies these world-saving enthusiasms...As Connelly lays out in painstaking detail, population control programs, aimed chiefly at developing nations, proliferated despite clear human rights abuses and, more importantly, new data and information that called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of the crisis mongers. (Steven F. Hayward
Claremont Review of Books )
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