Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of Americas Population / Leonard M. Lopoo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lopoo, Leonard M., Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Chicago University of Chicago Press, [2026]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

On the eugenic origins of US reproductive lawsand 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 Americansand especially poorer Americansplan not to have a family. In an unflinching treatise on one of the centurys defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the USs asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the countrys earlier sins: Americas first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth centurys 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

1. The Incompleteness of Government-Sponsored Family-Planning Programs

2. A Brief History of Eugenics

3. The Population-Stabilization Period

4. Medicaid as a Test Case

5. The Future Gap

6. On Wantedness

7. Who Gets to Have Children?

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed April 14 2026)

ISBN:

0-226-85015-3