"As fool-proof as possible": Overpopulation, Colonial Demography, and the Foundation of the Jamaica Birth Control League

This paper traces the early years of the Jamaica Birth Control League (JBCL): its foundations and founding members, its goals, and the challenges of its daily operations, from 1938 to 1942. It analyzes how changing international understandings of population growth buttressed and gave authority to the claims of middle and upper class birth control advocates on the island who viewed the growing population of the island’s Afro-Jamaican poor as a major obstacle to Jamaica’s development into a modern and potentially independent nation. While birth control reformers drew on the scientific authority of demography and the international networks of British and American birth control organizations for legitimacy, they faced difficulties in gaining government support for an island-wide program for contraception. These challenges elucidate the tensions between the desire to control the birth rate and the colonial government’s hesitation to directly enter the homes and sexual lives of the Afro-Jamaican majority.