Population controllers and the abortion movement

When former Oregon Republican Sen. Bob Packwood died earlier this month, the newspaper obituaries described him as a self-contradictory figure.

On the one hand, many women accused Packwood of sexually harassing them, and his own diaries seemed to confirm his lechery. On the other hand, he supported legal abortion and federal funding of contraception.

The purported contradiction here is illusory and based on ignoring Packwood’s record.

Packwood’s support for abortion and birth control should not be understood as an effort to liberate women. It was, instead, an effort to control the size of the human population, which he saw as destructive to the planet.

Packwood, in the tradition of his state of Oregon, was an environmentalist. For him, defending the environment required curbing human births. This meant more abortion, more sterilization, and more birth control.

Today, with birth rates well below replacement level and falling, overpopulation talk has slipped into the shadows. But as the abortion debates continue apace, it’s useful to recall how much Packwood-style green-tinted population control informed the pro-choice movement in its early days.

Bob Packwood, feminist?

For the left-wing media, the late Sen. Bob Packwood was a study in contrasts. The Washington Post’s obituary put it this way: “As a legislator, he advocated women’s reproductive rights, spoke in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and advanced the careers of female staffers on Capitol Hill. … But women’s groups that earlier lionized him denounced him after the Washington Post uncovered his long record of inappropriate sexual overtures.”

The New York Times used a similar framing: “Bob Packwood, a moderate Republican senator from Oregon who championed women’s rights but was forced to resign in 1995 after his fellow senators threatened to expel him for making aggressive sexual advances toward more than 20 women….”

How exactly did Packwood “champion women’s rights”? The New York Times explains:

“He was an early and vocal supporter of abortion rights. He introduced a bill to legalize abortion nationally in 1970, three years before the Supreme Court did so in Roe v. Wade, and he vigorously opposed Republicans who proposed anti-abortion measures.”

“I cannot reconcile these two views of him,” said Kate Michelman, president of the pro-abortion group NARAL in 1992, when a parade of women came accusing Packwood of groping, grabbing, and unwanted kissing. “He was an absolute champion of the issues we cared about, and I had never heard anything but that he was a very respectful, collegial person.”

The New York Times obit adds this telling detail: “His efforts won him the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1979….”

Margaret Sanger was the mother of 20th-century family planning and the founder of Planned Parenthood, now the nation’s leading abortion provider. She was also a racist and a leading champion of eugenics.

Packwood was not a eugenicist like Sanger, but his interest in abortion and birth control overlapped with Sanger’s: He thought there were too many people in the world, and he wanted to reduce the birth rate.

The most prominent population-controlling anti-natalist abortion champion of the 20th century was Paul Ehrlich, who also died earlier this year.

Ehrlich praised Packwood in his bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb: “Two bills oriented to population control have been introduced into both houses of Congress by Senator Robert Packwood and Congressman Paul McCloskey. One of them is a revision of income-tax laws to allow deductions for no more than two children per family. The other would completely legalize abortion.”

Ehrlich touted Packwood repeatedly throughout the book, celebrating that Packwood’s tax proposals would make “the plush life … difficult to attain for those with large families, which is as it should be, since they are getting their pleasure from their children, who are being supported in part by more responsible members of society.”

That is, Packwood wanted to use the tax code to coerce women to have fewer children than they wanted.

“Without smaller families, we are lost,” Packwood declared.

Packwood preached population control constantly. When he got an audience with 450 high school students, he used it to sell his “three-part program for population stabilization,” according to a contemporaneous article in the Associated Press.

“Packwood said overpopulation could be controlled with wider dissemination of information on contraception and family planning, elimination of abortion restrictions, and granting of tax breaks to small families,” the Associated Press reported.

FILE – Abortion-rights activists demonstrate against the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 30, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

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Again, feminism wasn’t the motivation. This was part of Packwood’s Earth Week celebrations.

When Packwood touted his tax bill on the Senate floor, he aligned himself with extremist anti-natalist organizations. “There is an organization called Zero Population Growth, whose basic postulate is to attempt to limit the population of this country to its present size, and they encourage people not to have more than two children.”

Now that the U.S. birth rate is 1.6 babies per woman, well below the level at which a population maintains itself, the organization, with its roots in the eugenics movement, has changed its name to Negative Population Growth.

Packwood bragged that “six of the eight members of the Eugene, Ore., city council … and the mayor have signed a personal pledge that none of them would have more than two natural children, or, if they already exceeded two natural children, they would have no more.”

This thirst for controlling the human population was Packwood’s prime motivator for supporting abortion. This makes it less baffling that Packwood could support abortion while treating women as objects. What is perhaps more surprising is that the abortion groups tolerated Packwood’s predations because he defended abortion.

Mary Heffernan, for instance, was an abortion lobbyist in the 1980s, working for NARAL, when Packwood grabbed her and forcefully kissed her. She made sure never to tell anyone until after his 1992 reelection and after other victims went public. Why? Because it could have imperiled the cause of abortion: “I was a lobbyist on an issue I cared very deeply about and he had a great deal of power,” she said, to explain her silence.

NARAL, while Heffernan was their lobbyist, continued to support Packwood.

NARAL’s Larry Lader

NARAL was originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and later was the National Abortion Rights Action League. Now, after a couple more name changes, it calls itself Reproductive Freedom for All.

It was founded not by feminists, but by men interested in curbing the population.

Socialist activist Larry Lader and abortionist Bernard Nathanson were the key founders of NARAL. Lader came to NARAL from running the Hugh Moore Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to controlling the human population. While Lader was the chairman of NARAL’s executive committee, he wrote Breeding Ourselves to Death, with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich.

Lader, like Packwood, saw population control as the aim, and abortion as the means. He convinced feminist leaders, such as Betty Friedan, to take up the cause of abortion.

When Lader organized the first national conference on legalizing abortion, Hugh Moore, the patron of the population control movement, funded it.

Eugenics was part of Lader’s campaign. “Above all,” Lader would write, “society must grasp the grim relationship between unwanted children and the violent rebellion of minority groups.”

According to Nathanson, who later repented of his abortion advocacy and became a pro-life leader, Lader’s reasoning was this: “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into the thing, while she still has control of them.”

Lader’s work was cited in Roe v. Wade, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would later note that population control was part of the motivation of the court’s majority: “The ruling surprised me,” Ginsburg would later say. “At the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

PAUL EHRLICH 1932-2026

Curbing the population wasn’t Lader’s only aim in advancing abortion. He also championed the overthrow of traditional sexual morality. Abortion, Lader said, “struck at the whole system of sexual morality to which the middle class gave lip service.”

Certainly Bob Packwood, NARAL’s favorite Republican, joined Lader in rejecting that whole system of sexual morality.