Carl Wahren was a leader in the field of family planning, with decades of experience in the fields of population policy, international family planning, and responsible parenthood. He worked actively with these topics from around 1962 to the late 1990’s, and continued with voluntary work after his retirement.

Although Carl passed away in early 2024, he kept a thorough record of all his work. A digital summary of this archive was provided by Carl himself, and is available here. It describes the multitude of articles, conferences, research reports and much more that made up his professional life. As there is much disinformation about historical family planning programs, Carl hoped that these records could serve as a more true-to-life description of how proponents of family planning actually worked.

The digital archive “A professional life with focus on population, ecology and family planning” is available as a pdf or a word-document.

In 2025, thanks to TOP and Carl Wahren’s daughters, a personal Carl Wahren Archive with all his collected material was set up at the Sweden’s National Archive (“Riksarkivet”), and it can be reached here.

In addition, here is paper by Carl (not available in the National Archive), published in a book by Berelson, B (Ed.) in 1969, “Family Planning Programs: An International Survey”. The title of Carl’s chapter (pdf) in the book is “Sweden: help from a small developed nation”. Thanks to Robert Gillespie for sending us the pdf.

See also an interview we held with Carl Wahren covering his career.