The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (11 page)

In addition to channeling money to groups like International Planned Parenthood—by the early 1970s USAID was providing over half the organization’s budget—Ravenholt initiated programs that sent workers into villages to blanket neighborhoods with pills. “The principle involved in the household distribution of contraceptives can be demonstrated with Coca-Cola,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1979. “If one distributed an ample, free supply of Coca-Cola into each household, would not poor illiterate peasants drink as much Coca-Cola as the rich literate residents?”
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In the spring of 1973, Ravenholt threatened to withdraw USAID funding from family planning organizers in Egypt unless they would agree to distribute contraceptives door to door. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had made family planning a priority in the 1960s, calling population growth “the most dangerous obstacle that faces the Egyptian people” in their drive toward development.
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But the government’s program, which made birth control pills available in all public health clinics, was a terrible failure. Most women didn’t respond, and those who did encountered confusion and disorganization. By the 1970s the program was only reaching around 3 percent of eligible rural women.
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To Ravenholt, the solution to Egypt’s problem was simple. Initially, he said, local partners had “recoiled in horror” at his idea, but once they realized it was the only way to keep getting money, they “muscled up the courage.” Here’s how it worked: Two field-workers, a man and a woman, would go to each house in a given area and offer three months’ worth of pills (which came in packets without Arabic instructions). They usually found women at home, and most of them accepted the pills, though they didn’t necessarily start using them. “Right away,” said Ravenholt, “a storm of discussion would begin among neighbors and between husbands and wives. Eventually, about half of the women who’d accepted the pills started taking them.”

After three months those who stayed on the pill would, of course, run out. “Well, they’re not going to go ten miles to get a pack when they know that Mrs. X, a neighbor, got some that she hasn’t used,” he said. “So the O.C. [oral contraceptive] user will go there and ask for her supply. And right then, a very important thing—a satisfied user, not pregnant, asking this person who didn’t use O.C.s and may already be pregnant for her pills. We found that within a year between 15 and 20 percent of the young women were using oral contraceptives regularly.”
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This, of course, was more than a health intervention—it was a way of changing some fundamental cultural patterns. In years to come such programs would spark charges of “contraceptive imperialism” from right and left alike. Some feminists would attack these schemes for foisting pills on women without telling them about side effects. Yet for a while, Ravenholt and his team were able to bulldoze through most resistance even as he made enemies for both his personal and his professional behavior.

Ravenholt was known for walking around with menstrual regulation syringes hanging out of his pants pockets, eager to show anyone who was interested how they worked. Joan Dunlop recalled his keeping a cannula in his front pocket and using it to stir his cocktails. She found his broad flirtatiousness deeply irritating; she and her female colleagues used to joke about the number of women he made passes at.
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And, indeed, after his first marriage broke up, Ravenholt dated a number of women in the field, including Sharon Camp, now the head of the Guttmacher Institute, the world’s leading sexual and reproductive health think tank. She’s much more sympathetic than Dunlop. “I thought Rei was a special kind of genius,” she said. “He had some really inspired ideas. He also had some very bad ideas. And he
loved
to pick fights. He often said things that got people riled up just because he loved a good fight. I think had Rei been a different personality, he probably wouldn’t have created so much rough and tumble around the issue, but he might not also have accomplished nearly as much as he got done. He was a very powerful personality, and a lot of the people who worked for him were really enthralled with him and his ideas, and they worked hard.”

Camp recalls a classic story about Ravenholt. It was at a conference on abortion, during a discussion on the use of anesthesia during first trimester terminations. “And Rei Ravenholt stood up and said, ‘I think it should be two martinis, because that’s the way she got pregnant to begin with!’ And the feminists in the audience went wild!”

Asked about it now, Ravenholt laughs and says that while he doesn’t recall the two-martini crack, it sounds like the kind of thing he’d say. “Oh,” he said, “I had a barrel of fun!”

R
ichard Nixon’s election in 1968 was a very good thing for the global population control movement. During the Kennedy administration he’d come out for American-supported birth control in the developing world, and once in office he made population issues more of a priority than any president before him. In July 1969 he released “A Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth,” a document on which Ravenholt collaborated. Population growth, it said, “is a world problem which no country can ignore, whether it is moved by the narrowest perception of national self-interest or the widest vision of a common humanity.” Increasing populations, Nixon argued, threatened to outstrip development in poor countries “so that quality of life actually worsens.” Nixon called on the United Nations to take the lead in reducing high birthrates, while promising increased U.S. support. He also asked Congress to create the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to further study the problem. It was formed in 1970, with a host of bipartisan worthies and Rockefeller as chairman; one newspaper columnist called it “the Establishment epitomized.”
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Meanwhile, population issues were gaining more and more salience. “It was exactly like the global warming coverage you get today,” said Potts. “A very, very important issue that educated and liberal people were sincerely worried about.” In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who had previously specialized in butterflies, published his bestseller
The Population Bomb,
which became a sensation. The alarming prologue began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
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T
hese were heady days in the field. “There was a spree that has never been recaptured,” said Duff Gillespie, who began a long career at USAID as one of Ravenholt’s researchers. “I mean we did crazy stuff and everything was kind of new.”
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The condoms available when Ravenholt got started were gray and unlubricated; his office obtained lubricated ones, and then, in 1972, the first multicolored condoms—red, green, blue, and black—produced in the United States. “[T]hat helped to break the ice, because whenever I introduced a bunch of multicolored condoms to a new audience they couldn’t help laughing,” Ravenholt said.
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Logistics were always a problem, so people in Ravenholt’s offices sometimes doubled as couriers. “I used to carry two suitcases with me when I went overseas,” said Gillespie. One had his clothes, and the other was filled with condoms, birth control pills, and vacuum aspiration kits. “Basically, we were smuggling in contraband for a U.S. government program.”

Gillespie recalls one trip to Tunisia. Worried about taking a suitcase full of condoms through customs, he asked someone at the local USAID mission for advice. “Just tell them it’s your personal stuff and they won’t even open up the suitcases,” the staffer told him.

Arriving, he did just that, but the customs official opened his suitcases anyway. One was full of condoms—at least five hundred of them. “So this is for your personal use?” he asked. Gillespie kept a straight face and said, “Yes, it is.”

After a tense moment the man burst out laughing, then called his friends over. Gillespie handed out condoms to all of them.
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To Gillespie, Ravenholt was a great man. “I’d say three fourths of the ideas that Rei came up with were totally outlandish and in some cases comical,” he said. “But the other fourth was absolutely brilliant. He did things that other people hadn’t even thought about and are now sort of standard operating procedures for international public health.”
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Birth control pills, for example, had been sold in packages of twenty-one; women were supposed to count seven days before starting a new one. In poor countries, where few people had calendars, it was hard for users to stay on schedule. So Ravenholt added seven iron tablets, making the transition between packs seamless and treating widespread anemia at the same time.

F
or all their audacity, it was clear to Ravenholt and other leaders of the population field that if the most visible face of the family planning movement remained American, a backlash would be likely. Already there was significant leftist opposition to birth control programs. At home black militants decried government-funded contraception as a tool of genocide. Communist countries argued that population control was a way of avoiding more pertinent issues of development and economic redistribution. Mired in Vietnam, the United States, the global Santa Claus of birth control, was ever more unpopular.

It “was important to get a multilateral action going, because if it were just the United States pushing birth control, no doubt there would be political reaction to that,” said Ravenholt.
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American leaders wanted to see the United Nations take the lead.

Despite the opposition of Marxists and Catholics alike, the major international organizations were growing ever more receptive to population programs. Robert S. McNamara, who had resigned as defense secretary in 1967 to become president of the World Bank, had become convinced that overpopulation was a major obstacle to development. At the United Nations, family planning was being discussed under the rubric of human rights. On Human Rights Day in 1966, UN secretary-general U Thant declared, “We must accord the right of parents to determine the number of their children a place of importance at this moment in man’s history.” In 1968 the International Conference on Human Rights in Teheran affirmed that couples have the “basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children.” The affirmation of birth control as a basic human right would have profound consequences in the decades to come, but at the time it elicited neither much comment nor controversy.

For the UN to be effective, though, it needed to coordinate its family planning efforts. Together, Rockefeller and Draper worked to convince Thant to establish the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), later shortened to United Nations Population Fund, as a central source of money, resources, and information for family planning programs around the world. It supported both private groups and government initiatives, and would eventually work directly on the ground. At the start the United States agreed to provide $7.5 million in matching funds, and Draper lobbied European leaders tirelessly to contribute. Twenty-four countries pledged over $15 million in 1970, and the next year forty-six countries pledged almost $30 million.
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America’s ardent support of the UNFPA seems ironic now, because Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have consistently defunded, attacked, and undermined the agency. By the 1990s, right-wing operatives would be dogging UNFPA staffers in the field—sometimes putting the staffers’ lives at risk. Echoing the seventies far left, they would spread rumors of the UNFPA’s genocidal intent. During the era of George W. Bush, European countries would increase their support of the UNFPA in part to signal their defiance of the United States, the country that created it in the first place.

E
ven in the early 1970s, when the United States was the UNFPA’s greatest champion, signs of the kind of abortion politics that would explode later in the decade were already emerging.

Rockefeller’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future finally released its recommendations in the election year of 1972, and they were revolutionary. His commission urged comprehensive sex education in the schools, stepped-up government funding for family planning, access to birth control for minors, liberalized abortion laws, government subsidies for abortion services, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. (The suggestions weren’t uniformly liberal—they also called for stringent limits on immigration and a crackdown on illegal aliens.)

“The majority of the commission believes that women should be free to determine their own fertility, that the matter of abortion should be left to the conscience of the individual concerned, in consultation with her physician, and that states should be encouraged to enact affirmative statutes creating a clear and positive framework for the practice of abortion on request,” said the commission’s report.

Several Protestant and Jewish groups signed a statement praising the report, but the Catholic bishops were predictably outraged, and Nixon rejected it decisively. He had built his electoral coalition on Middle American whites baffled and outraged by the social upheavals that had begun in the 1960s, and feminism and abortion rights were increasingly associated with countercultural mayhem. Unrestricted abortion policies would “demean human life,” he said, and distributing contraception to minors would “do nothing to preserve and strengthen close family relationships.”
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