Margaret Sanger recounts her life from early childhood until 1931, when a victory in her fight for the legalization of birth control in the U.S. seems near. The account of the highs and lows suffered in forging an organized movement devoted to planned parenthood is highly personal.

Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake humanity by policing national borders and breeding better people. As the population of the world doubled once, and then again, well-meaning people concluded that only population control could preserve the “quality of life.” This movement eventually spanned the globe and carried out a series of astonishing experiments, from banning Asian immigration to paying poor people to be sterilized. Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. But it had to contend with the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception and nationalist leaders who warned of “race suicide.” The ensuing struggle caused untold suffering for those caught in the middle—particularly women and children. It culminated in the horrors of sterilization camps in India and the one-child policy in China. Matthew Connelly offers the first global history of a movement that changed how people regard their children and ultimately the face of humankind. It was the most ambitious social engineering project of the twentieth century, one that continues to alarm the global community. Though promoted as a way to lift people out of poverty—perhaps even to save the earth—family planning became a means to plan other people‘s families. With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s withering critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.

Poor Women, Powerful Men chronicles the achievements and subsequent failure of the Louisiana Family Health Foundation, the most extensive family planning program ever to operate in the United States. Martha C. Ward's even-handed account reveals the mechanisms—of politics, poverty, and public health policies—at work in the perpetual controversies surrounding reproductive rights and the delivery of health care services to the poor. Ward's book begins in the early 1960s when Louisiana was among the most underdeveloped states and ranked at the bottom of all scales measuring illiteracy, illegitimacy, and infant mortality. Despite the free statewide Charity Hospital system, many routine preventive medical and public health services were not available to poor women and their children, particularly if they were black. But in the mid-1960s, a visionary group of doctors and health care practitioners began to clear the hurdles erected by law, church, and the medical-political establishment. By 1970 they had set up the first statewide family planning program for poor people in the United States. The Louisiana experiment was a spectacular success. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations poured millions of dollars into the program. The Great Society and War on Poverty programs placed a high priority on the health of poor mothers and infants. With the help of the population lobby—including Planned Parenthood and the Agency for International Development—the Family Health Foundation moved into Latin America and other developing areas. But in 1974, the bubble burst. Accusations of fiscal mismanagement, fraudulent statistics, patronage, and political payoffs led to federal indictments and jail sentences for top officials. Poor women and powerful men, the black and white communities, and the liberal and conservative medical factions were pitted against each other. With the collapse of the program, methods for handling the epidemic of adolescent pregnancies and the high infant mortality rate reverted to the state bureaucracies. Poor Women, Powerful Men is the first book-length account of the Louisiana experiment. In a clear and dispassionate voice, Ward demonstrates that many of the questions raised by the experiment persist. Is family planning an answer to the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancies, and infant mortality? How can the conflict between private and public delivery of medical care be resolved? Where do the reproductive rights of women fit into governmentally supported birth control programs? We seem no closer today to answering these questions than the Louisiana Family Health Foundation was more than a decade ago.