Our lightning round explores the place of ‘elite women’ in discourses and community-organizing around birth control, reproduction, and overpopulation in national and transnational contexts. Discussions around maternal welfare and women’s health were often the focus of feminists who organized based on their shared status as being ‘elite’ – this is broadly defined in terms of class, caste, race, ethnicity, and educational status. We examine the ways in which wealthy women’s status informed the nature of their engagement with their female audiences and/or the women they claimed to represent in their discussions of reproductive healthcare and motherhood. We situate the context of our papers in the United States, the US-Mexico Borderlands, South Korea, and India. In linking these discussions, we will attempt to untangle the role of these elite women leaders (including Margaret Sanger and the members of the League for Women Voters) in determining a narrative around maternal and child health, and reproductive control. This narrative was premised on cementing their own status as the definitive authority on issues of women’s reproductivity in the eyes of male dominated national, colonial, and international policymaking groups. It was also contingent on maintaining their own seemingly elevated status in comparison to the women they claimed to advocate on behalf of – the women who they portrayed as being the appropriate targets for family planning or other educational programs. This negotiation of their professional and personal status was a tenuous one, and we seek to understand the discursive and material maneuvers they engaged in as they tried to maintain this status through the shifting political and social milieus of nation-building, anti-colonialism, suffrage, and the Cold War. While some of the actors we hope to discuss are considered global ones – such as Sanger – we also examine how these larger narratives about maternal health and overpopulation were localized in the US Progressive Era, late Colonial India, and the creation of the post-war global world order in 1950s in the US-Mexico borderlands and South Korea.