In 1950, the United Nations established December 10 as Human Rights Day. The decision created an annual occasion to celebrate the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to evaluate the rights it declared. On Human Rights Day in 1966, UN Secretary-General U Thant issued a surprising statement to the press. He did not address the rampant human rights violations of the 1960s, such as South African apartheid, the escalating war in Vietnam, or the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Nigeria leading up to the Biafra war; instead, he raised concerns about the “number and quality of human beings on earth.” In poor regions of the world, he explained, population growth threatened to endanger human rights like the freedom from hunger, the right to medical services, and the right to education. To counteract population growth, U Thant sought to establish another human right – the right to contraception. The availability of contraceptives, he argued, would lead people to have smaller families, reduce population growth rates, and thereby protect other human rights.Footnote ¹

Six months later, U Thant established the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). It would soon become the world’s major sponsor of global birth control programs and was supported by developmental aid from Western countries and philanthropic foundations. Such programs distributed contraceptives and educated men and women about their use. Soon, they developed into a global contingent of population planners, doctors, nurses, and field workers. In 1971, fifteen Asian, seven African, and four Latin American countries had programs in place. These countries accounted for almost 30 percent of the world’s population, including countries with high fertility rates like India, the Philippines, Ghana, and Colombia. Altogether, there were 45,366 family planning clinics in which more than 1.7 million people eagerly campaigned for using contraceptives to reduce family sizes.Footnote ² Programs like Family Planning 2030, which focuses on thirty-four countries in Africa and Asia, continue similar practices.

The creation of the UNFPA and the beginning of large-scale family planning programs in the 1970s was a striking breakthrough. When the UN first discussed global demographic developments in the 1940s, promoting smaller families on a global scale was unheard of. One reason was that questions of sexuality and contraception conflicted with deeply held moral convictions and religious beliefs, as well as with cultural practices of proudly having large families. Also, interventions by Western governments and organizations in the Global South – and, even more so, in the bedrooms of their populations – were a delicate foreign policy matter during the Cold War. Hence, since the United Nations’ founding, there had not been a consensus among member states about how to address global population growth.Footnote ³ Socialist states pushed back against an overpopulation discourse that they considered to be “bourgeois” and “neo-Malthusian.” They claimed that capitalist economies rather than population growth caused food shortages and a lack of economic development. The Catholic Church and countries where it held sway saw family planning as a direct threat to its 1930 papal encyclical Casti Connubii in which it rejected contraception as interference with the God-intended reproductive functions of sexuality. It reaffirmed its position with the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, which the Vatican still defends.

This book argues that in this controversial political environment, the human rights framework employed by U Thant was a major reason family planning programs became successful from the 1960s on. Although he was the first UN Secretary-General to speak openly about the potential consequences of population growth, references to human rights had been used to justify population control from the 1950s. For example, in 1952, the Indian government explained its first population control policies by citing international social justice and human rights obligations. In the 1960s and 1970s, transnational organizations like the Population Council or the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which had become the most important planners and administrators of global birth control programs, made the defense of human rights a cornerstone of their public lobbying campaigns. A sizable segment of the international women’s movement, which campaigned around issues of female health and sexuality, argued that women’s human rights were potentially endangered by population growth.

Remarkably, human rights were invoked when justifying birth control programs, yet these programs often entailed forms of blackmail and coercion.Footnote ⁴ Since the 1940s, authors like William Vogt, Frederick Osborn, and Paul Ehrlich spoke of a “final crisis” facing humanity due to a “population bomb” that would soon detonate. They warned that millions of people would starve.Footnote ⁵ This alarmist discourse coincided with technocratic social planning by Western elites and the modernization drive by authoritarian governments in the Global South. In this toxic environment, the priority was not individual well-being but the rapid reduction of fertility rates to slow or even stop population growth. In recent years, historians have uncovered numerous violations committed in the name of population control programs: poorly tested contraceptives were distributed to local populations; potential side effects were concealed; and the rural poor were lured into sterilizations by lotteries offering huge sums of money with an almost zero chance of winning.Footnote ⁶ In some instances, men and women were coercively sterilized, for example during the Indian state of emergency between 1975 and 1977.Footnote ⁷

This book provides the first systematic historical analysis of why and how organizations and individuals implementing or at least defending such measures started referring to human rights to justify their policies. It offers an alternative reading to the established literature, which provides three possible answers to explain the role of human rights for global birth control programs. First, this literature argues that until the 1970s, limiting birth rates was the primary focus resulting from the serious concerns about overpopulation. Only interventions by the women’s movement from the mid-1970s onward emphasized human rights concerns, resulting in a policy change in which individual rights prevailed over demographic policies. The International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, which established the concept of individual reproductive rights, is seen as a turning point. Scholars holding this position, most notably Matthew Connelly in his seminal study, Fatal Misconception, argue that human rights and birth control represent contradicting policy approaches by different actors.Footnote ⁸

A second strand of the literature sees human rights not as an indication for a policy change but as a rhetorical trick to disguise the birth control advocates’ actual goals. These scholars claim that human rights language was used as a semantic deflection to implement the hidden political agenda of population control.Footnote ⁹ Third, the contemporary understanding of reproductive rights and reproductive health is portrayed as a necessary consequence of the human rights codified after 1945. Scholars making this argument have a cascading view on human rights. They argue that human rights influenced ever larger political fields, including reproductive policies. For example, the Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, published in 2017, argues that today’s declarations on reproductive rights were inherent in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and the UN human rights resolutions on family planning in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰

All of these scholars made important and sometimes path-breaking contributions to the historiography of population control in the twentieth century on which this book builds and to which it is indebted. But their explanation of human rights’ significance only captures parts of a more complex problem. The established explanations raise several questions: How can we causally link the advent of human rights language to the second women’s movement given that references to human rights became ubiquitous in overpopulation discourse long before the 1970s? If we instead explain the advent of human rights as a rhetorical trick by population control advocates, why did they continue to speak openly about threats of “overpopulation” and the need to reduce birth rates, including by coercive means, after they had adopted a language of rights? And why should reproductive rights have been an eminent part of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights? The UN drafting commission worked on the declaration’s text for almost two years and kept meticulous minutes of the drafting sessions, which do not once mention reproductive policies, family sizes, population growth, or contraception.

Given the omnipresence of the human rights language in debates about population growth, it is striking that the origins and the changing meaning of this language have not yet been systematically studied. This gap can be explained by the history of the historiography of population policies. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, historians of medicine contributed original and innovative research about eugenics ranging from racial betterment programs in the United States to the murder of the mentally ill during the “euthanasia” programs in Nazi Germany. Too easily they expanded this history into the post-1945 world. In the 1980s and 1990s, German historians such as Götz Aly and Heidrun Kaupen-Haas argued that demographics would be a reminder of Nazi population policies and became active in social movements against the German census in 1987.Footnote ¹¹ Historians such as Paul Weindling, who contributed outstanding research for understanding global eugenics programs, argued that on an international level, overpopulation discourse and birth control represented a global extrapolation of past eugenics policies. It seemed unthinkable to link human rights to such authoritarian programs.

No doubt, these contributions articulated an important critique. They reminded those who spoke offhandedly about overpopulation of the very recently committed medical crimes for which a similar language was employed. But narratives of continuity between eugenics and overpopulation painted with broad brush, which made it inconceivable to identify such political agendas with human rights or any other liberal ideas. Despite the broad use of the term “eugenics” for the description of a large array of medical crimes and even genocide, the history of eugenics itself became more nuanced in the 1980s and 1990s. It became increasingly acknowledged that countries’ policies were different in character and that not all forms of eugenics escalated into mass crimes.Footnote ¹² This research stressed eugenics’ popularity among socialist intellectuals of the interwar period, particularly among German and Swedish Social Democrats who aimed at improving the biological makeup of what they saw as an insufficiently politicized “proletariat” or who wanted to adopt measures of social hygiene to improve population health.Footnote ¹³

Despite this reevaluation of eugenics policies in the interwar period, research about global birth control in the second half of the twentieth century is still dominated by political demarcations and moral condemnations. Based on an overemphasis of theoretical models like Foucauldian biopolitics, several authors continue to claim that Nazi population policies and post-1945 overpopulation discourse are structurally similar. Thomas Etzemüller, for example, speaks of a “population matrix” or a “people/space model” in which he places both Nazi demographer Friedrich Burgdörfer and the Swedish eugenicists and social reformers Gunnar and Alva Myrdal.Footnote ¹⁴ Next to Alison Bashford, Matthew Connelly has written the best historical study about the population control movement to date. In it, he emphasizes that he is critical of population control advocates and thanks his parents for having so many children.Footnote ¹⁵

In his book, Connelly himself raised the question of why “organizations that proclaimed family planning as a human right fail[ed] to oppose increasingly coercive policies in India and China[.]” While Connelly’s question contains a dichotomy – coercive policies on the one hand and human rights on the other hand – I argue that the population control movement’s reasoning from the 1950s onward did not necessarily think of human rights and coercion as a dichotomy. Population growth seemed like such a grave threat for these actors that coercion became an option in the defense of long-term societal progress and individual freedom. In his work, Connelly regularly points to the war-ridden and martial metaphors used by population controllers. In India, for example, Hansa Mehta argued in the mid-1960s that the Indian state would have to wage war against population growth: “It is war that we have to wage, and, as in all wars, we can not be choosy, some will get hurt, something will go wrong. What is needed is the will to wage the war so as to win it.”Footnote ¹⁶ If we stay within the framework of this martial metaphor, it can be argued that population controllers thought of coercive policies as a good war, maybe even as a humanitarian intervention, that could potentially protect human rights by averting “overpopulation.” While Connelly and I consult similar archival holdings, I have systematically looked for references to human rights and humanitarianism within these files. Additionally, newly opened archival files by the Population Council and its founder John D. Rockefeller III shed new light on the significance of human rights for the Population Council’s political and diplomatic efforts in the 1960s, which emphasized human rights.

Another reason it seemed unthinkable to link human rights to population control lies in the fact that human rights themselves have largely been associated with defending individual well-being and a teleological understanding of societal progress. This book’s revisionist approach strongly builds on a historiography of human rights that challenged this perception, including recent works by Maud Bracke that have investigated the contentious meanings of reproductive rights within the feminist movement.Footnote ¹⁷ Contributions to human rights historiography provided fascinating insights into the spatial and temporal changes in the meaning and significance of human rights. They demonstrated that human rights served as references for both oppositional politics and for constructing and stabilizing power relations – ranging from the international post–World War II order to conservative policies in Western Europe and the rise of a neoliberal paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ¹⁸ More generally, the new historiography on human rights emphasized that despite their universal claims, human rights interpretations were bound to concrete historical spaces and actors.

Despite being counterintuitive, human rights seem a perfect fit for describing the perceived problem of “overpopulation.” The UN’s concept of human rights as codified in 1948 signaled a dramatic change compared to previous periods. In contrast to human rights of the eighteenth century, as expressed in the US Declaration of Independence or during the French Revolution, human rights claims of the 1940s did not focus on regulating the relationship between newly created governments and their citizens. Instead, every individual was, at least morally, entitled to rights, independent of his or her nationality (or statelessness). This new, universal claim made human rights a powerful tool to approach global problems such as population growth. The historical actors I analyze in this book, mainly individuals who were active in the US and British population control movements, were creative in how they used human rights for their policy goals. They believed that a low supply of contraceptives was the major reason for high population growth rates. To make contraceptives available against moral, religious, and cultural convictions and practices, they described the access and the use of contraception as an individual human right. They also believed that being entitled to contraceptives was not enough. Population control advocates did not only ascribe to individuals the right to contraception; they also expected them to exercise that right. The paradoxical nature of this concept is exemplified by the UK-based International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which entitled its 1967 conference “Planned Parenthood: A Duty and a Human Right.”Footnote ¹⁹

The conceptual duality of right and duty created tensions between different human rights claims. Asking people to exercise the human right to contraception to have fewer children potentially clashed with other individual rights, including the right to found a family as declared in Article 16 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also raised the question of whether the dangers of overpopulation for imagined collective rights like economic progress or the protection of natural resources were so grave as to justify the limitation of individual rights.

The history of population control is a fascinating example of conflicts between individual and collective rights, but these conflicts are also a structural feature in the wider history of human rights.Footnote ²⁰ During the drafting process of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these tensions raised questions on different levels. Between communities and their member states: Do international organizations like the UN have jurisdiction over human rights violations in sovereign nation-states? Between social and cultural groups and their individual members: Do individuals hold universally accepted rights, or can certain groups declare rights bound to their specific political and cultural imaginary? And between general concerns of humanity and for the individual: Does humanity as a collective have certain rights that allow it to limit the rights of individuals?

Without explicitly answering these questions, the UN Human Rights Declaration acknowledged the existence of tensions between individual and collective rights. After listing several individual rights, Article 29 declared that communities also had certain rights. It argued that only within a community would an individual’s free development be possible, which is why the community itself needs protection. As Article 29 stated, the exercise of individual rights can be limited by the “just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”Footnote ²¹ It remained unclear how, for example, to define general welfare or how tensions between specific human rights can be resolved. However, it demonstrated that the drafters of the Declaration believed that rights placed the individual into a community in which she or he had to accept certain limits to individual rights. Population control advocates used this collective interpretation of rights in the 1948 UN Human Rights Declaration to later argue that communities must be protected from overpopulation.

This reasoning became so successful on an international stage that it reached the main human rights departments within the UN. To take stock of the development of human rights, the UN organized a global conference in Tehran, which opened in April 1968. Besides other issues, including South African apartheid, colonialism, and race relations, delegates discussed the relationship between human rights and family planning. On the final day, the conference adopted a resolution entitled the Human Rights Aspects of Family Planning, portraying population growth as hampering the realization of human rights. The resolution also codified a couple’s human right to contraception. It declared that couples should have a human right “to freely and responsibly decide on the number and spacing of their children.”Footnote ²² In the aftermath of this conference, the UN struggled to reconcile how far individual freedom could go and who was to decide what a “responsible” number of children was.

The history of the role of human rights for reproductive policies also sheds light on the legal problem of conceptualizing the family as a holder of rights. The couple in the form of the family, historically imagined as a heterosexual married couple with children, contains tensions between individual and collective rights in a concentrated form. In several human rights declarations, including the 1948 UN Human Rights Declaration (Article 16) or the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 23), the family is a protected group within society. On the one hand, it is constituted as a private space and has the right to be protected from another collective, which is the state. On the other hand, the family is itself a collective, consisting of at least two, but potentially more, members. When a right is assigned to a couple, who gets to decide whether and how to exercise it? Overall, investigating the relevance of human rights references in debates about global population policies is a suitable case study for a wider historicization of conflicts between individual and collective rights.

When designing this study, I made several methodological and theoretical decisions. First, both human rights and overpopulation are global discourses that cannot be understood by adding up national examples. It was necessary to analyze global spaces in which representatives of nation-states and increasingly also transnational nonstate organizations discussed their policy positions. The book therefore uses a wide range of sources from the UN as an international organization. The UN records contain minutes of conferences and discussions of the UN leadership and officials serving in several departments, shining light onto different human rights positions regarding reproductive policies. At the same time, the UN increasingly developed into a forum in which transnational activists and organizations aimed to advance their own agendas. These organizations’ significance was elevated until at least the 1960s, before which reproduction and sexuality were topics often too delicate for governments and the UN to address. Two of these organizations are analyzed in detail: the Population Council and the IPPF. They were both founded in 1952 and soon became the most important nonstate actors to contribute to discussions about overpopulation. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into research into new methods of contraception and aimed to create global alliances of states to effectively implement birth control programs. While they aspired to be international organizations – something the IPPF could easier claim than the Population Council – they can, at least until the 1980s, be regarded primarily as American and British actors.

Second, there is a plausible argument that humanitarian justifications for reproductive policies originated in the interwar period. Indeed, eugenicists referred to birth control as a service to humanity. In the 1920s and 1930s, such ideas ranged from US birth control advocate Margaret Sanger to German eugenics and “racial hygiene.” Even in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described the demand of sterilizing “defective people” as the “most humane act of mankind.”Footnote ²³ But it was only after 1945 that serious attempts to regulate population growth based on international law and human rights developed. Despite the overlaps with a wider humanitarian discourse, human rights must be seen as a distinct form of regulation. Human rights discourse went beyond empathy for the suffering of others to putting demands about legal entitlements and obligations at the forefront. Also, from the 1940s on, the concern about global population growth reached a new level of urgency. In this context, the founding of the UN created a new global order in which discussions about populations were bound to a new form of regulating international developments.Footnote ²⁴

To investigate the origin of human rights references in debates about population control, it would have been sufficient to concentrate on the period from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. But with the global expression of human rights concerns about population growth and the UN declaration of a human right to contraception in 1968, a larger history unfolds about the interpretation of this right. Particularly, two groups that entered the scene in the 1970s remain relevant today: international lawyers and the feminist movement. International lawyers commented on the new human right to contraception and discussed whether its protection would allow circumventing state sovereignty. Feminist organizations from the 1970s onward demanded to transform the couples’ right to contraception into an individual right. At the same time, most of them remained concerned about population growth as a threat to women’s rights. They argued that a large number of births would be physically harmful to women and hamper their aims of pursuing careers outside the home. To properly investigate these new actors and their impact on the population control movement, my research period ends in the mid-1990s with the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo declaring “individual reproductive rights”, a term still relevant today. Including the 1990s also enabled me to take into account the frictions between feminist organizations on reproductive rights, which resulted in schisms that still shape the contemporary women’s movement.

Third, investigating human rights on an international level comes with a methodological problem: To understand why birth control programs were justified by using the language of human rights, we need a discourse analysis methodology. It allows us to gain a deep understanding of semantic shifts and the contexts in which certain human rights interpretations were put forward.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, the political impacts of certain discourses and resolutions cannot be understood without integrating other approaches as well. Particularly, this book deals with UN resolutions, many of which were not binding and held contested meanings. To investigate the transfer of these global human rights claims into specific domestic policies, the book investigates how the human right to contraception was interpreted in different nation-states. When did states and other actors emphasize the freedom to use contraception? When did they stress responsibilities toward the community? While the driving actors analyzed in this book are mostly based in the United States, it aims to demonstrate how quickly this US-based discourse became globalized and how human rights language became malleable for actors in starkly different domestic contexts.

The book uses four case studies to analyze countries that represent different approaches to the legality and illegality of contraception, the North–South divide, and Cold War conflicts. Based on these criteria, the book uses India, Ireland, the United States, and Yugoslavia as case studies to ask the following questions: How did India interpret the human rights resolutions on contraception given that it was one of the first states to implement birth control programs, starting with their first five-year plan in 1951? What role did human rights have during the Indian emergency from 1975 to 1977 in which more than eight million people were sterilized, some of them coercively? Which position did Catholic Ireland have on the human right to contraception given that contraceptives were illegal in this country until the 1980s? Did the international human rights resolutions come up during debates about the legalization of contraception despite their focus on countries with high rates of population growth? Which relevance did the human rights framework have for the US foreign policy during the Cold War, given that they did not support birth control programs until the 1960s because they feared “anti-American propaganda” by the Soviets? And how can we explain that Tito’s Yugoslavia supported international human rights resolutions on contraception despite the widely established communist critique of overpopulation discourse?

Analyzing why and how human rights references became tied to an overpopulation discourse is historically fascinating. Birth control programs became one of the largest social planning operations after the end of World War II. The population planners wanted nothing less than to change the reproductive behavior of large parts of the world’s population. Uncovering the role of human rights in these large-scale programs is not only historically significant but also relevant for contemporary debates. Today, varied groups ask questions about who has the right to have children, how many, and, with the ever-increasing significance of gene editing, which children are worth having. Annual UN projections about future population growth are regularly transformed into dramatic headlines. Currently, it is expected that, in 2100, between 10 and 13 billion people will populate the globe.

Conflicts do arise about how to interpret these numbers. In 2013, the book Ten Billion by the controversial British scientist Stephen Emmott spoke about an “unprecedented planetary emergency” resulting from a combination of population growth and our way of consuming and producing goods. Others called such perspectives “misanthropic” or argued that they would entail racist perspectives, as in almost all scenarios, poor countries with nonwhite populations were seen as the main contributors to global population growth.Footnote ²⁶ Critics of the overpopulation discourse have also pointed to decreasing rates of population growth. In the 1960s, the global population grew by a rate of 2 percent; in the past decade, growth decreased to 1.1 percent. Despite this decrease, environmental concerns about population growth remain relevant in contemporary discussions. In scientific and scholarly circles, the term “Anthropocene” became widely established to describe how human beings developed into a geological force, fundamentally altering the planet and causing climate change.Footnote ²⁷

Such environmental concerns, together with the fight against HIV/AIDS and for reproductive rights, form the rationale for family planning programs today. Nonstate organizations are still at the forefront of administering and planning these programs. They still include the main nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of this book, the Population Council and IPPF, and newly founded organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. While the distribution of contraceptives is still the main aim of these programs, the biggest difference from similar programs of the 1960s and 1970s is that the involved organizations do not speak about population growth anymore. It is not surprising that these organizations became cautious in the language they use given the coercive history of population control and the public critique of those policies.

A clear example of not talking about population growth comes from an opinion piece from climate activist David Roberts for the popular website vox.com, in which he explained why he never discusses population growth or overpopulation. He admitted that the existing population growth was a problem, and that its reduction would be more efficient than any other environmental policy measure, but given the problematic history of population policies, he decided not to mention it in his works. Instead, he suggested speaking about women’s emancipation and women’s rights, which would indirectly lead to decreasing population growth rates anyway. He concluded: “Tackling population growth can be done without the enormous, unnecessary risks involved in talking about population growth.”Footnote ²⁸ The article was widely shared on social media and has calmed liberal consciousness. It was possible to acknowledge the problems resulting from population growth, particularly in developing countries, without having to talk about it.

Such an approach involves a dual problem. First, it strengthens information asymmetries. Experts from these programs are aware of population growth as a variable affecting ecological and economic developments and implicitly aim to reduce it without communicating it explicitly, effectively keeping program recipients unaware. Second, such an approach contributes to the already existing conspiracy theories about population policies. There is a wide spectrum of such ideas, which are available in left-wing and right-wing variations. They stretch from theories about an imperialist agenda to control poor countries to conspiracy theories of a planned population “exchange” or “replacement” using migration from overpopulated countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East to displace populations in Europe.

Openly discussing population growth as a factor impacting the world’s social and economic systems would be important to counter such conspiracy theories. This also includes publicly acknowledging the authoritarian policies of the past implemented under similar programs. Instead of confronting this history, organizations like the IPPF portray themselves as standing in a long history of fighting for human rights. This is not entirely false, as human rights have become an important justification for their policies since their founding. But while IPPF’s first constitution adopted in 1953 spoke about defending human rights, it had a radically different concept of human rights compared to today’s definitions. Margaret Sanger, who served as IPPF’s first president, argued that only those who will act rationally by planning their families should have rights; all others, she argued, “who do not have the individual initiative and intelligence to plan and control the size of their families should be assisted, guided and directed in every way to eliminate the undesirable offspring, who usually contribute nothing to our civilisation but use up the energy and resources of the world.”Footnote ²⁹ Given this radically different eugenic notion of human rights, suggesting that organizations like IPPF have always fought for individual well-being and universal human rights is as simplistic as the accusation often aired within conservative circles that these organizations represent the same eugenic ideas as they did when they were founded.

That organizations like IPPF or the UNFPA are extensively using human rights language in their current projects is logical. Politically, they are under huge pressure and confronted by anxieties about both over- and underpopulation in different authoritarian countries. In highly populated countries like China, they counteract demands for coercive measures by pointing to the human rights of individuals to make their own reproductive choices. At the same time, they also use human rights to argue against attempts to curtail the availability of contraceptives in order to increase population growth. The latter phenomenon has become more widespread in recent years in Eastern Europe, where right-wing governments in Hungary or Poland combine a discourse of national awakening with calls to have more children.Footnote ³⁰ In these instances, UNFPA officials also emphasize that the availability of contraceptives is a human right that should not be sacrificed to increase national populations. Understandably, practitioners in the field are frustrated when historians’ accounts seem to make this approach more difficult by pointing to problematic past uses of human rights. By carefully analyzing the different turns and shifts in how human rights in reproductive policies were understood, this book attempts to make this history transparent and to start a conversation between historians, activists, and practitioners that might enable more honest references to a human rights framework for reproductive policies today.