The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (9 page)

Rockefeller was a shy and modest man, known to travel coach on the train from New York to Washington, D.C. According to Joan Dunlop, who spent several years as his chief aid on population issues, he was deeply sympathetic to women. “[H]e used to say to me, ‘You know, I go to all these dinners around the world, [with] heads of state, and I always sit next to the women, to the wives. And they always strike me as much more intelligent than their husbands. Much more interesting, much more intelligent,’ ” she recalled.
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G
eneral William Draper was at least as influential as Rockefeller in creating the international family planning movement, pushing both the United States and the United Nations to get involved in birth control programs all over the world, but the two men were profoundly different. Draper was brash and aggressive, a man’s man. Dunlop, herself known for her sharp tongue and quick judgments, found him “boorish and arrogant and cavalier.”
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“Some people thought he pushed too hard,” said Phyllis Piotrow, who worked as Draper’s executive secretary. “John D. Rockefeller III, who was a very modest person and didn’t push, . . . always thought Draper pushed too hard, should be more modest and so on. But you know, when you’re John D. Rockefeller you can be modest and still get things done. When you’re somebody like Draper, who is a self-made person, you have to be more aggressive to get things done.”
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Get things done he did. By the late 1950s, Draper, a Harlem-born investment banker, had built a burnished, solidly establishment career. He had risen through the military during World War II, eventually serving as undersecretary of the army and supervising the occupations of Germany, Austria, and Japan. He was involved in organizing the Berlin airlift in 1948, and after the war he moved to Mexico to head the Mexican Light and Power Company. In 1958, when President Eisenhower convened a committee to review foreign aid priorities, he seemed a natural to lead it.

The day after the Draper Committee was established, the general received a wire from Hugh Moore, the Dixie Cup magnate. His message to Draper was this: “If your committee does not look into the impact and implications of the population explosion, you will be derelict in your duty.”
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According to Piotrow, who later wrote an important account of the birth of U.S. population policy, Moore’s message prompted chuckles among the committee members, but Draper took it seriously enough to learn more. Eisenhower himself nudged the general to delve into it further: In December 1958, Draper was invited to discuss the committee’s work at the National Security Council, and as he was speaking the president said, “And Bill, don’t forget the population problem, because that is very serious in some of these countries.”
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He didn’t forget, and as he traveled the world for the committee he became a true believer. “We found, the committee of ten, that in most of the developing countries their rate of population growth was such that it was interfering seriously with their economic development, particularly with any improvement in their per capita income,” he said.
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In 1959 he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The population problem, I’m afraid, is the greatest bar to our whole economic aid program and to the progress of the world.”
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He also saw what family planning could do. Like Rockefeller, he’d spent time in postwar Japan. Returning a decade later, Piotrow wrote, “[H]e observed at first hand how, with legalized abortion and considerable publicity, the Japanese people had sharply reduced birth rates and achieved their ‘economic miracle.’ ”
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The Draper Committee’s final report, published in July 1959, concluded that population growth was reversing any gains that economic aid might offer poor countries. It recommended that the United States “assist those countries with which it is cooperating in economic aid programs, on request, in the formulation of their plans designed to deal with the problem of rapid population growth.” It also urged the government to support population research within the United Nations.

By the end of the year population growth and birth control had become major public issues. In October 1959, Arthur Krock published a
New York Times
column headlined “The Most Dangerous Bomb of All.” “In the rush of the great nations to produce nuclear weapons capable of agonizing mass destruction, and now to find means to turn them into the utilities of peace, their Governments have paid small attention to the limitation of a more dangerous instrument for the destruction of civilization that is swiftly being assembled,” Krock wrote. “The social scientists have named this weapon ‘the population bomb.’ ” He quoted the editor of the Princeton alumni weekly, who warned of “billions of half-alive, starving peasants, condemned to short, miserable lives of hatred and hunger.”
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Leaders around the world had come to the same conclusion. At a 1959 conference of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in New Delhi, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru warned that population growth portended a “tremendous crisis.”
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At the beginning of 1960, Reuters reported from Karachi, “Pakistan is preparing to open a campaign for population control that could mean the difference between life or death by starvation for many of its 87,000,000 people.”
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Sweden had begun helping some of its aid recipients implement birth control programs.

In the United States public discussion of birth control remained extremely difficult—its sale was still illegal in some states. Still, things were changing. Several Protestant denominations, including the United Presbyterian Church and the American Baptist Convention, endorsed family planning in 1959. A study group of the World Council of Churches, an ecumenical body that brought together representatives of major Christian denominations (though not Roman Catholics), published a report titled “Responsible Parenthood and the Population Problem.” It strongly supported birth control and lamented that in the past “Christian thought has, especially in the area of the family and its relationships, often clung to tradition without taking into account new knowledge.”
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The Catholic Church reacted to the emerging conventional wisdom with alarm. In a November 1959 statement the Catholic bishops in the United States decried the “terror technique phrase ‘population explosion,’ ” calling it a “smoke screen behind which a moral evil may be foisted on the public.” It attacked the “present attempts of some representatives of Christian bodies who endeavor to elaborate... a theological doctrine which envisages artificial birth prevention within the married state as the ‘will of God.’ ” Further, it declared that American Catholics “will not support any public assistance, either at home or abroad, to promote artificial birth prevention, abortion or sterilization, whether through direct aid or by means of international organizations.”

Protestant leaders criticized this stance; San Francisco Episcopal bishop James A. Pike said it would “condemn rapidly increasing millions of people in less fortunate parts of the world to starvation, bondage, misery and despair.” In what seemed a clear provocation, he asked whether the Catholic bishops’ policy was binding on Catholic politicians.
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“With that blunt inquiry, Bishop Pike inevitably dropped the problem at the doorstep of the nation’s best-known Roman Catholic office seeker—Jack Kennedy,” wrote
Time
toward the end of 1959.
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The approaching election would be the first since 1928 to feature a Catholic candidate, making the burgeoning conflict over contraception even more heated. “The birth control issue was joined, and Jack Kennedy knew that the deep-rooted religious challenge to his presidential ambitions, newly burst into the open, could be hazardous indeed,” concluded
Time
.

Kennedy was forced to walk a fine line. He opposed American support for international family planning programs, but he was anxious not to be seen as taking orders from the church. In a phone interview with James Reston of The
New York Times
, he attacked population control from the left, calling it “mean paternalism.” “I think it would be the greatest psychological mistake for us to appear to advocate limitation of the black, or brown, or yellow peoples whose population is increasing no faster than the United States,” he said. His position, he emphasized, preceded the bishop’s statement and wasn’t influenced by his Catholicism.
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E
isenhower was alarmed at the potential for a religious fissure in the United States, and he tried to make the issue go away. Despite his earlier concern about population, at a December 1959 press conference he decisively rejected Draper’s family planning recommendations. “This government will not, as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with the problem of birth control,” he said. “That’s not our business.”

But the public movement was growing. “From the private organizations came a deluge of publicity and agitation,” wrote Piotrow.
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Newspapers all over the country published editorials calling for government action on overpopulation. Planned Parenthood collected the signatures of 179 world leaders from nineteen countries on “A Statement of Conviction About Overpopulation,” which it published as an advertisement and presented to UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld.
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At the State Department a group of family planning advocates worked to change policy from the inside, while Draper made constant lobbying trips to Washington, D.C.

As the momentum built, Eisenhower came to regret his earlier capitulation. In 1963 he published a piece in the
Saturday Evening Post
titled “Let’s Be Honest with Ourselves.” “When I was President,” he wrote, “I opposed the use of Federal funds to provide birth control information to countries we were aiding because I felt this would violate the deepest religious convictions of large groups of taxpayers. As I now look back, it may be that I carried that conviction too far. I still believe that as a national policy we should not make birth control programs a condition to our foreign aid, but we should tell receiving nations how population growth threatens them and what can be done about it.”
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In 1964, at Draper’s invitation, both Eisenhower and Harry Truman became honorary chairmen of Planned Parenthood.

The taboos that had once made birth control an outré subject for public discussion were crumbling. The Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptives in 1960. In its 1965 decision
Griswold v. Connecticut
the Supreme Court ruled Connecticut’s ban on contraceptives unconstitutional. When the Johnson administration took over, it worked, quietly but steadily, to expand access to family planning at home.
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Dean Rusk, the secretary of state under both Kennedy and Johnson, had previously been the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. After Johnson was elected in 1964, Rockefeller persuaded Rusk to try to insert a mention of population into the president’s first State of the Union address.
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He succeeded. Addressing the nation on January 4, 1965, Johnson said, “I will seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources.”

Soon Johnson was running with the issue. Six months after the State of the Union, in a speech on the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations, Johnson implored the world body to “face forthrightly the multiplying problems of our multiplying populations.... Let us act on the fact that less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth.”
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He acted on his own advice, in one shameful instance using food aid as leverage to pressure India to adopt both agricultural reforms and family planning. Johnson “had put food-grain aid to India on a month-to-month basis because India, relying on the U.S., had neglected its rural economy and failed to promote family planning,” wrote Joseph Califano Jr., one of the president’s senior aides. “As the 1965-67 Indian drought and famine worsened, all the President’s agricultural and foreign policy advisers urged him to expand food shipments to India immediately. But Johnson wanted India to take care of itself—improve its agricultural production, end food hoarding, and control its population.”
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In October 1966, Johnson received the first Margaret Sanger Award in World Leadership, sending Labor secretary Willard Wirtz to accept it on his behalf. “It was a tribute no other President would have risked accepting,” wrote Califano.
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Meanwhile, Congress was also taking initiative. Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, convened a series of subcommittee hearings on birth control and population growth. Eisenhower submitted written testimony, saying, “If we now ignore the plight of those unborn generations which, because of our unreadiness to take corrective action in controlling population growth, will be denied any expectation beyond abject poverty and suffering, then history will rightly condemn us.”
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For a moment it even seemed as if the Catholic Church might come around. In 1962 the reformist Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, a historic convocation of bishops, cardinals, and superiors of men’s religious orders, which met over four autumns. Vatican II, as it would be called, was revolutionary. It was meant to “open the windows” of the church to the modern world, in the pope’s famous phrasing, and to cast off some of the church’s insularity and authoritarianism. In many ways that is what it did. Vatican II brought a number of reforms, including the use of congregants’ native tongues rather than Latin in the celebration of mass; an endorsement of religious freedom as opposed to state-mandated Catholicism; and, importantly, a rejection of anti-Semitism and the charge that the Jewish people are culpable for the killing of Christ.