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In 1798, an Anglican minister by the name of Thomas Malthus published the first edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population where he speculated that the humans reproduce exponentially while their ability to increase agricultural could not sustain growing populations.
Malthus’ ideas quickly became the foundation for a movement that began to preach population control and contraception as the keys to socioeconomic development and the betterment of Western society. His ideas on population selection inspired Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of evolution and were highly influential on Francis Galton and the field of eugenics.
By the early 20th century, Social Darwinism and eugenics was all the rage and population control was primarily advocated as a way to improve the gene pool and to weed out undesirables, primarily through sterilization.
Social Darwinism was frequently mixed with pseudoscience, racism, and hyper nationalism, a toxic concoction which was later extended to its full brutal scale by the Nazi party in Germany during the Holocaust in their attempt to create a master race.
It is typically carried out with the support of governments, multilateral and international organizations, or foreign aid programs, but population control activities can be executed by any governance structure where a group or individual exercises control over the fertility of a population of people.
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