Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the House Foreign Affairs Committee to talk about Iran, but wound up defending the Obama administration’s promotion of abortion rights abroad. “We happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health, and reproductive health includes access to abortion,” Clinton told the committee, with considerable emotion.

The exchange was yet another skirmish in what President Obama recently characterized as a “stale and fruitless debate.” Stale — perhaps for some — but surely not fruitless. There are real winners and losers in the abortion wars. Last month at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, Clinton triumphantly announced that Washington would provide $545 million for family planning and “reproductive health” throughout the globe, while the United Nations Population Fund would receive $50 million in federal dollars for this fiscal year.

Additional beneficiaries include the impoverished women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America — at least if you accept the evidence presented in Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. Though family-planning advocates once used a doomsday scenario of overpopulation to justify such federal expenditures, now activists invoke the need to liberate women from the subjugation of fertility and patriarchy.

This book arrives at an opportune moment for the Democratic-party leadership, who have sought to neutralize pro-life criticism of Obama’s aggressive commitment to abortion rights. With considerable passion and persuasiveness, the author makes her case that poor women throughout the world depend on U.S.-funded family planning, including abortion provisions, and that they suffer profoundly when this aid is reduced or denied. This argument provides a handy framework for a new U.S. foreign policy that backs legal abortion as a fundamental human right.

“All over the planet, conflicts between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women’s bodies,” pronounces the author, who keeps the action moving — from U.N. confabs in Cairo and Beijing, to dusty African villages devastated by AIDS, to ramshackle clinics in Nicaragua, where Catholic leaders have learned to become savvy players in the culture wars.

The author presents herself as an “investigative journalist,” an interlocutor between these forces of tradition and modernity. However, her presentation favors one side of the debate: Research conducted by organizations with a stake in abortion advocacy are cited without sufficient context or skepticism.

The author belittles the late Pope John Paul II, a towering pro-life leader, but never really addresses his key point — that the right to life serves as the foundation upon which all other human rights are built. Goldberg says she wants to help women by making abortion the centerpiece of a global strategy for women’s economic and political liberation. But if the pope is right, the promotion of abortion rights will undermine, not strengthen, women’s status.

Still, this book aspires to be something more than a series of talking points tailored to a new American era of abortion-rights advocacy. Goldberg is surprisingly candid about the eugenicist roots of early population-control efforts, and readers learn about the unintended consequences of aggressive family planning, such as the destruction of traditional values that once discouraged risky sexual behavior. These well-funded programs also attract the best medical personnel, creating an imbalance in local health services.

The most interesting element of the author’s narrative is her backward glance at Washington’s post-WWII efforts to stem the rapid increase in global population. If anything could encourage a dispassionate view of today’s “science based” fads, Goldberg’s snapshots of “population bomb” hysteria might do it. As one earnest expert recalls, “It was exactly like the global warming coverage you get today . . . a very, very important issue that educated and liberal people were sincerely worried about.”

In the Sixties and Seventies, no one but the Vatican and a handful of Marxists quibbled with America’s decision to export contraceptives. Pope Paul VI predicted that contraceptive use would both encourage the sexual exploitation of women and become a “dangerous weapon . . . in the hands of those public authorities.” But China’s one-child policy was still to be hatched, and the pope’s warnings went unheeded.

The Marxists rightly viewed this initiative as an attempt by Western technocrats to tamp down class warfare. Population control was the new weapon of choice against global poverty and the seductions of Communist ideology. LBJ even got away with withholding food aid to India when New Delhi didn’t move quickly enough to reduce fertility rates. By the late Sixties, the U.N. got on board and embraced the right of parents to control their family size as a fundamental human right.

The Reagan administration was the first Republican White House to confront a runaway family-planning bureaucracy that had metastasized into a fulcrum of feminist opposition to traditional marriage and sexual values. In part, Reagan was impatient with economic-development experts who devoted their energies to curbing overpopulation while ignoring the statist policies of one-party governments. These policies suppressed wealth creation — and if our purpose is to feed, educate, and employ the needy, why not oppose these policies, rather than advocate a policy of eliminating the needy?

When Reagan-administration officials sought to modify the old model of economic development and contain abortion advocacy, feminists fought back. The ensuing culture wars have dominated landmark U.N. conferences on women’s rights over the past two decades. A small but surprisingly effective alliance of religiously conservative nations (including the U.S. during Republican administrations) engages in an often surreal rhetorical battle with the feminist representatives of powerful NGOs and multilateral organizations (backed by Democratic administrations).

The author, for her part, is prepared to acknowledge that family planning alone can’t solve women’s problems. Given the general unreliability and brutish behavior of the average husband and father in the developing world, what women really need, she asserts, is real economic and political power. This utopian vision of female autonomy, secured in part through legal abortion, suggests that Goldberg has absorbed a good deal of heated rhetoric vented during those U.N conferences.

But the author also ignores a vital fact of basic human survival in the developing world, where widows are universally pitied: The last thing women want is an exit plan for husbands and fathers. What’s needed is help making men part of a solution that embraces the equal dignity of both sexes, who must share responsibility for raising children and shoring up family resources.

Transplant the dreams incubated in Planned Parenthood strategy sessions to real households in Africa and Asia, and you immediately confront the false promise of “reproductive rights.” But don’t tell that to the author and our new secretary of state; they know what women need, and they’re going to make sure women get it.

– Joan Frawley Desmond has written for the National Catholic Register, The Weekly Standard, and First Things, among other publications.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its initial posting.