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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.9
EAN: 9780674024236
ISBN: 0674024230
Label: Belknap Press
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 544
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Publisher: Belknap Press
Studio: Belknap Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:


Listen to a short interview with Matthew Connelly
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane



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.

(20080114)




Rating: - International Organizations = Interest Groups
The author makes a compelling case that population control groups are accountable to no one. Driven by their own particular ideologies, they operate with little regard to either the welfare of individuals within nation states or the overall interest of the countries they seek to influence.
The larger point is that international organizations behave in similar fashion to interest groups: i.e., controlled by elites and driven by narrow ideologies.

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Rating: - Narcissistic and flawed.
In as much as hysterics over global population have been with us a LONG time, and in as much as hysterics over a coming ecological meltdown have been with us for quite some time as well, this book provides a decent overview of what the author seems to regard as extreme views in the population debate.

However, that said, this book's author takes a tone that is inappropriate for a dispassionate scholarly work. One reviewer of the book, Dr. Jay Winter of Yale said that Dr. Connelly's work ... Read More

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Rating: - A tired `anti-imperialist' screed divorced from environmental reality
Connelly manages to write a massive volume without substantively addressing several key issues:

1) the finite availability of natural resources and the limits to growth it imposes
2) the role of religious & cultural superstitions in fighting voluntary population control
3) the unlikelihood of people accepting a reduced standard of living
4) the relative value of informed versus uninformed decision making

Connelly analysis is essentially cornucopian. He shows ... Read More

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Rating: - Lions and tigers and too many babies, oh my!
This is a beautifully written book about an incendiary topic.

Starting with Malthus many argued that population would overwhelm our resources. Life expectancy kept growing, swelling the levels of humans alive.

A vast population control movement swung into motion, bent on stamping out population growth everywhere, but especially in poor countries.

Many of the early members of the movement seemed inspired by racism.
Margaret Sanger and the eugenics theories ... Read More

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Rating: - Fatal Omission Regarding the Rest of Life
I find it problematic that Mr. Connelly concludes that because reproductive rates are decreasing overpopulation is no longer a problem. While reproductive rates are decreasing the human population is still growing. Also, nowhere in this book is the rest of life mentioned. One of the problems of our massive population is the effects that humans are creating with the current loss of biodiversity. While Mr. Connelly laments the travesties committed against humanity his failure to provide any reference to the ... Read More

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