Wanting Children

On the eugenic origins of US reproductive laws—and the surprising policy changes needed to remedy it.The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. Wanting Children posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.

Leonard M. Lopoo is the Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics and professor, chair, and associate dean of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, where he directs the Maxwell X Lab and serves as senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. His popular writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal.