Cold War & Contraceptives: What Does It Take To Control A Population?
Contraceptives and their role as a eugenic medium across the globe
When reading a population pyramid, one must consider the various proponents. A population pyramid with a wide base and a narrow peak is usually read as a sign of growth, a young country with room to expand, as the majority of the population is young and often has shorter life spans. In contrast, a pyramid with a narrow base and a wide peak is representative of lower birth rates, but longer life expectancies.
American strategists during the Cold War saw something else in that same shape. A large cohort of young, landless men in a developing nation looked less like a future workforce to them and more like a future insurgency waiting on a cause. Containment had already organized U.S. foreign policy around stopping Soviet influence via any tool available, and by the 1960s that tool extended into reproductive policy, disguised as development aid.¹ Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb gave face to the conflict; however, the discussion behind it had already been running for years. Since the Kennedy administration had folded family planning into development aid, funding contraceptive programs across the developing world under a humanitarian banner while internal planning circles were far more candid that the real aim was keeping newly independent nations, especially across Asia, tied to the “free world” bloc rather than drifting toward the communist alternative.²
That strategy hardened into formal doctrine under Nixon, whose administration commissioned a secret 1974 study led by Henry Kissinger that drew on the National Security Council, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID. The “result was [the] National Security Study Memorandum 200”, which is a classified assessment concluding that “population growth across the developing world posed a real threat to American security and economic interests”.³ Research on the intrauterine device throughout the 1960s was closely bound to population control priorities, and scholars have described the IUD as a politically versatile technology that mapped Cold War geopolitics.²
Family planning and population control tend to get used as if they mean the same thing. In Puerto Rico, a sterilization program funded through the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ran through major hospitals and clinics starting in the 1930s. A 1975 investigation found that close to a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, a rate that climbed to nearly 39 percent by 1982 before policy shifted toward a “reproductive rights” framework.⁴
In India, the World Bank loaned $66 million specifically for sterilization initiatives, and American food aid to a famine-stricken India was made contingent on the country’s success at reducing its birth rate. That leverage culminated in Sanjay Gandhi’s mass vasectomy campaigns during the 1975 to 1977 Emergency, which swept up unmarried and underage men and provoked a backlash severe enough to help end Indira Gandhi’s government in 1977.⁵
In Brazil, a family planning organization affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation ran sterilization campaigns under a military dictatorship that officially opposed the group’s foreign ties, while the Catholic Church condemned the same program on religious grounds and leftist organizations denounced it as Western imperialism. Three ideologically opposed forces all share a similar conclusion, highlighting the demographically engineered, perhaps even imported, version of healthcare that existed during this time.⁶
What makes this history so unsettling is how openly some of its architects admitted the trade-off they were making. Within the American population establishment, a degree of coercion was treated as an acceptable cost of curbing global population growth.⁷
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Across every regime, in every corner of the globe, the common unfortunate thread seems to be the crystallization of women’s wombs into mere statistics and means for population optimization and national security rather than an individual who has the right to contemplate whether this is the lifestyle she hopes to pursue.
Waad El-hadi is a Staff Writer at Cabin Fever Magazine. She discusses the impact of colonization and conflict on wellbeing.
References
- Containment. History Guild. Published January 17, 2023. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://historyguild.org/containment/
- Suzuki A. Population control in Cold War Asia: an introduction. East Asian Sci Technol Soc. 2016;10(4). Accessed August 3, 2026. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1215/18752160-3678322
- The population control holocaust. The New Atlantis. Published September 30, 2020. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-population-control-holocaust
- U.S. sterilization policies in Puerto Rico. Wikipedia. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._sterilization_policies_in_Puerto_Rico
- Sharma Y. India forcibly sterilised 8m men: one village remembers, 50 years later. Al Jazeera. Published June 25, 2025. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-sterilised-eight-m-men-one-village-remembers-fifty-years-later
- Planning a family: birth control, sterilization, and the welfare of society in Cold War Brazil. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe. Published March 28, 2024. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379276476_Planning_a_Family_Birth_Control_Sterilization_and_the_Welfare_of_Society_in_Cold_War_Brazil
- Women’s Liberation Workshop. Women’s Day March [poster]. 1975. Published September 11, 2020. Accessed August 13, 2026. https://daily.jstor.org/what-was-womens-liberation/
- Zubrin R. The population control holocaust. OrthoChristian. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://orthochristian.com/54248.html
