Friday essay: ‘too many Aboriginal babies’ – Australia’s secret history of Aboriginal population control in the 1960s

Aboriginal women faced covert government family-planning programs, designed ostensibly to promote “choice”, but ultimately to curb their fertility. For decades, Indigenous communities have spoken of the coercive practices of officials and medical experts around birth control and sterilisation, and how they experienced them. Now historians are finding evidence of these practices in the government’s own records from as recently as the 1960s and ‘70s.

Australia