TOP is proud to present our second film featuring family planning pioneers. Given the contemporary trend to write family planning success stories out of history, we feel it is vital to put on the record the first-hand accounts of those who were involved.
By The Overpopulation Project
Malcolm Potts, who died April 2025 at the age of 90, was a professor in Maternal and Child Health and holder of the Fred H. Bixby Endowed Chair in Population and Family Planning in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, USA. As physician, reproductive scientist and contraceptive evangelist, Potts spent more than half a century directing programs that provided family planning services to women in developing countries. For instance, he helped to develop and promote the device most frequently used to perform surgical abortions, making them more safe.
Malcolm Potts’ valuable and enduring work in developing countries stands out. As medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and later as president of Family Health International, he advised and collaborated in many government and NGO family planning programs from Bangladesh and South Korea to Egypt and many others. In Thailand, he worked together with physician Alan Guttmacher and Mechai Viravaidiya to organize the first community-based distribution of oral contraceptives and condoms. The project contributed to a decline in the total fertility rate in the country from 7.4 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.5 by 2022. Potts later stated that without this achievement, “Thailand is unlikely to have become the prosperous, democratic country it is today.”
More recently, Potts co-founded an organization now known as OASIS (Organizing to Advance Solutions in the Sahel), devoted to educating adolescent girls, reducing maternal mortality, and expanding voluntary family planning in the Sahel region of Africa. Alisha Graves, a co-founder of OASIS, describes the background of this project: “The Sahel has rapid population growth, high malnutrition and low literacy.” She explains that Malcolm Potts ”always wanted to focus on the poorest parts of the world, and women who are most at risk”.
Beside such valuable and impressive work, Malcolm Potts was also a productive scientist and published ten books and several hundred scientific papers. This film is based on an interview Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa conducted with Malcolm from 2017, where he describes his background, work and vision. We encourage readers to share this video, to help combat the prevailing misinformation about voluntary family planning programs and their role in curbing population growth in developing countries.
TOP thanks those who made this film possible: Dr Sofia Pineda Ochoa for the film interview, Dr Nap Hosang and Alisha Graves for help and advice, Madison Iler, Richard Grossman and Alisha Graves for donations, and AWARE film and Johan Heurgren for film production.
The first film in our series about Family Planning Pioneers featured Carl Wahren and his work for international aid to developing countries. You can watch that film here.
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