An excerpt from Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population (University of Chicago Press, 2026) was recently published in ARC Magazine. The book, written by Len Lopoo, professor, chair and associate dean of public administration and international affairs, traces how America’s first reproductive policies were shaped by eugenicists focused on limiting births among lower-income and minority populations.

Following is a portion of the excerpt:

Why do we support contraception but not fertility treatments? Government-sponsored family-planning programs, and more generally all of our population policies, are currently shaped by some of the most insidious thinking of the last two centuries. Even where the policies’ intents are not malicious, they remain shaped by, and limited by, forces of malevolence from earlier eras. The United States does and should continue to legislate to support family planning, but its policies should be reconsidered and designed to increase wantedness.

What do I mean by wantedness? We are better off as a society when all parents have children intentionally—that is, when they think they are ready financially and emotionally, which includes preparing for children prenatally. Wantedness as a goal brings clarity to the design of and proposed changes to our family-planning programs (to all population policies, really). If we used wantedness as a decision rule for family planning, no one would be surprised by my suggestion to add infertility supports.

Many population policies are not well thought out. They are the result of the preferences of leadership at the time they were passed. They are created piecemeal, and we end up with policies that are incomplete, narrow, or contradictory. This haphazard approach to family planning, which was motivated at various times (and with different levels of emphasis) by eugenic or health equity arguments, explains why government-sponsored family-planning programs today focus on limiting fertility, while never considering infertility support. If policies were written around wantedness, it is likely the United States would have a family-planning program that has both a fertility limiting component and a fertility augmenting component. Wantedness is the defining feature that should guide family-planning programs and really any population-oriented policy. Once one moves to the wantedness mindset, offering infertility support seems a lot less unusual.