Thread by @oolabmys

#Population control In the 1950s and 1960s, much of the attention of eugenicists was focused on the new political interest in planetary population control. A new vocabulary anchored by the prospect of a “population bomb” (the title of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 (1/18)

book) emerged as it became clear that the technologies of World War II had improved both life expectancy and in some instances infant mortality. The advent of antibiotics and pesticides, nutritional gains derived from food rationing and more ef f i cient agriculture, (2/18)

and success in minimizing debilitating diseases had added some 15 million to the Earth’s population each year of the war, a striking contrast to the devastating ef f ects of World War I.

That the most signif i cant growth in population was in Asia and Africa amplif i (3/18)

ed Cold War anxieties about political unrest and instability in these areas.

Alarm over burgeoning birth rates was not limited to the West.
#India and #Pakistan sought to reduce population growth after the war. Family planning became of f i cial state policy in India (4/18)

in 1951. In 1958 a member of #Parliament from northern India unsuccessfully proposed a law to sterilize those with “undesirable mental and physical conditions,” but when Indira #Gandhi was elected to lead India in 1966, she set family planning targets at 6 million (5/18)

intrauterine device (IUD) insertions and 1.23 million sterilizations for the year. Within a decade her notorious mass sterilization campaign had made world headlines. Between 1974 and 1977, there were some twelve million sterilizations in India, of men more than women (6/18)

since vasectomy was quick and cheap.
Government employees were under huge pressure to coax people to be sterilized, facing suspension or nonpayment of wages if they did not cooperate, or if they failed to meet government quotas.
Teachers who declined sterilization could (7/18)

lose pay, and villages receiving irrigation waters risked having their water supply cut if they failed to meet local sterilization targets. People were of f ered small gifts such as tins of cooking oil and transistor radios in exchange for agreeing to sterilization. The (8/18)

campaign was hugely unpopular and secured the resounding defeat of Gandhi and her Congress party in 1977.

#Singapore’s National Family Planning Programme, begun in 1966, also targeted population reduction, legalizing birth control and abortion in 1970. In 1972 the (9/18)

government introduced a two-child policy intended to maintain replacement-level fertility. It of f ered schooling and housing incentives alongside deterrents to further births. In the 1980s a decidedly eugenic change in policy focused on encouraging educated women to (10/18)

bear more children; by 1987 women with fi nancial means were being encouraged to have large families. T

A concerted pro-natalist ef f ort in the eastern European Soviet satellites in the 1960s did not extend to ethnic minorities, who continued to be reviled for their (11/18)

large families. In #Czechoslovakia, #Romany women faced forced tubal ligations both under the Soviet regime and after independence.
Eager to encourage the right people to reproduce, #Romania implemented a tax on childless #Romanian adults over twenty-f i ve in 1966, (12/18)

discouraging contraception and supervising pregnant women. Those with large families were entitled to better housing and larger rations as well as maternal leaves and sponsored childcare.

Two years after Indira Gandhi was thrown out of of f i ce in India, #China (13/18)

instituted a one-child policy and then, in 1995, a Law on Maternal and Infant Health Care (initially identif i ed as a eugenic law) that made sterilization or permanent contraception a condition of marriage for those with heritable diseases and permitted abortion of (14/18)

fetuses with genetic defects. Those with conditions such as hepatitis or sexually transmitted disease were required to defer marriage until successfully treated. Although implementation remains weak and spotty, and in some places has been ignored, the law still (15/18)

exists.

... in India, state of f i cials were pressured to meet quotas, and the result was that some quarter of a million women, mainly indigenous #Quechua and #Aymara, were sterilized between 1986 and 1988, often under coercive conditions. At the 1995 United Nations (16/18)

women’s conference in Beijing, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori hailed his policies as a feminist breakthrough, yet in practice this was a policy hauntingly similar to other racially targeted sterilizations so often favored by eugenicists throughout the twentieth (17/18)

century.

Eugenics A Very Short Introduction
Philippa Levine (18/18)