Sometimes I wish I were living 150 or 200 years in the future, because I’ll never visit Florence when it isn’t clotted with other people. Depopulation, we are told, is coming, possibly in unthinkably dramatic fashion. It’s just not coming fast enough for my lifetime.

The population boom was predicted, most famously in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), a doomsday book about mass famine. But that trend is reversing for many reasons, and the crucial enabler is the pill.

It was initially cleared by the FDA as a treatment for menstrual disorders, but it was always about birth control. Championed by activist Margaret Sanger and funded by Katharine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, the pill was developed by Gregory Pincus, a scientist frozen out of Harvard for controversial IVF research. Large-scale trials among poor women in Puerto Rico, where birth control was legal, proved the pill nearly 100 percent effective despite dismissed side effects and limited consent.

It’s been accused of being both a tool of feminist sexual debasement and a tool of misogynist control that puts the onus for birth control on women. The earliest users of the pill are now women in their 80s, and the direst prognostications of shortened lives and infertility have proven unfounded.

And now the specter of depopulation is being raised, just like overpopulation was sixty years ago. I suspect depopulation will be like overpopulation, i.e. not as catastrophic as predicted. We tend to underestimate how good we are at adapting.

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Special thanks to Everett Taasevigen for suggesting the pill.

Links:

• Fascinating graphics: “The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?” The New York Times, September 18, 2023

  
  

• The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation – Charles C. Mann, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018

  
  

• Reproductive Rights in the US: Timeline – Lesley Kennedy, History, n.d.

  
  

• A Timeline of Contraception – PBS American Experience

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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