The population control movement, perhaps better identified as the contraception-abortion-sterilization medical-industrial complex, is one of the world’s most powerful social movements. This book provides a brief history, and contemporary description, of this movement.
Our narrative begins in the 1790s with Malthus’s Essay on Population. Malthus wrote for two audiences. To the general public he pontificated highfalutin pseudo-science. To fellow gentry he anxiously introduced Political Economics.
Malthus did not really think the world was overpopulated. He wrote about the “scanty population of the earth.” He worried not about Earth’s ecological carrying capacity but about: “the natural tendency of the labouring classes of society to increase beyond the demand for their labour.”
The Berkshire Bread Act (1795) spurred Malthus to activism. The Act used parish levies to supplement incomes of the poor. Certain rural elites, represented by Malthus, feared such payments would undermine labour discipline.
In 1803 Malthus said of the unemployed man:
“…if the society do not want his labour, he has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.”Malthus did not want English labourers to emigrate. He did not want them to stop having kids. He simply did not want them breeding beyond the market demand for their labour. (more...)
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