The population-control freaks are back in town. Two factors have given the neo-Malthusians hope that their bleak world view and dismal remedies might once again become intellectually fashionable.

The first is the notion that the most efficient way for mankind to cut its carbon emissions is not to breathe at all - or at least to do so in much smaller numbers. The second is the recent rapid increase in food prices worldwide - which the neo-Malthusians, as ever, do not believe is capable of being addressed by either the market or agricultural technology. These days, even apparently liberal commentators in the mainstream press write effusively in admiration of China's coercive one-child policy.

Against this background, the publication of Matthew Connelly's book is not just perfectly timed: it is essential. The assistant professor of history at Columbia University has delivered a devastating account of the population-control movement; he demonstrates, detail by shocking detail, how a movement that believed it was acting from the highest humanitarian ideals became responsible for callous abuses of human rights on a global scale, ruining millions of lives in a grotesque eugenic experiment.

It is appropriate that such a book has been written by an American. For, as Connelly shows, the population-control movement was bankrolled by America's biggest private fortunes - the Ford family foundation, John D Rockefeller III, and Clarence Gamble (of Procter & Gamble). These gentlemen shared not just extreme wealth but a common anxiety: the well-to-do and clever (people like them, obviously) were now having much smaller families than their ancestors, but the great unwashed - Chinamen! Indians! Negroes! - were reproducing themselves in an irresponsible manner. What they feared was a kind of Darwinism in reverse - the survival of the unfittest.

Their patron saint (though she would have abhorred this term) was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger, herself the sixth of 11 children, proclaimed that, “The third group of society are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequence of their acts...many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded and dependent upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the mind of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”

This was to become a global mission for the likes of Gamble, who saw the teeming masses of Asia as ideal subjects for his gimcrack experiments with low-cost contraception. Gamble cooked up in his own laboratory something called “salt rice jelly” which, via the good offices of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, was pushed up the vaginas of countless Indians.

This was nothing compared to some of the devices that these characters inflicted indiscriminately on the bodies of the women of the subcontinent. The interuterine device known as the Dalkon shield had already been the subject of lawsuits in America: it featured rows of prongs that made it extremely painful to insert or remove and had a multifilament “tail” that provided a path for infection. Hundreds of thousands of these unsellable monstrosities were enthusiastically picked up on the cheap by the head of USaid's “population programme” - with inevitably gruesome consequences.

This was not considered a problem by those in the front line of the “war against population explosion” - far from it. A note of a 1962 conference speech by one of those warriors, JRobert Willson, the chair of obstetrics and gynaecology at Temple University, makes this all too clear: “We have to stop functioning like doctors. If we look at this from an overall, long-term point of view...perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilising but not lethal.”

Later, USaid would find a less agonising and more efficient way of rendering millions of Indian women infertile - by funding bribes for sterilisations on a vast scale during Indira Gandhi's period of office. It showed the scale of the moral self-delusion on the part of the international “population progamme” that they were shocked when, in the Indian general election of 1977, Mrs Gandhi's Congress party was annihilated in the polls. In the states that had registered the largest increases in sterilisation, the Congress party, hitherto dominant, lost 141 out of 142 seats. As Connelly observes: “Something more powerful than promises of food and fuel had defeated the ideology of population control: people voting, one by one.” This option was not available to the people of China, whose one-child policy was also enthusiastically supported by western governments, although they were fully aware of the horrifying abuses of human rights that were being inflicted on Chinese women in the euphemistic name of “family planning”.

Perhaps the most disgusting episode in this book is the account of the 1983 awarding by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) of a gold medal and diploma to the Chinese general responsible for the most coercive policies. Javier Perez de Cuellar, the UN secretary-general, expressed his “deep appreciation” for the way in which Xinzhong Qian had “marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale”. Within months, following protests by the All-China Women's Federation against the physical abuse of pregnant women (and infanticide), a worried Chinese government had sacked Qian for his excesses; but the old soldier got to keep his gold medal and diploma from the UNFPA.

The ultimate farce is that all this misery and abuse was pointless, even on its own terms: the size of families fell dramatically during the last half of the 20th century in developing countries without strong population-control programmes. Independently of government action, families across the world were making rational choices appropriate to their particular circumstances. As Connelly concludes, “The fatal misconception of population control was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves.”

Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly
Harvard £22.95 pp521

Times Recommends

• 10 things you should avoid in hospital (unless there really is no option)
• Exclusive: Philip Pullman's essential reading list
• The White War by Mark Thompson