Frederick S. Jaffe

The original memo is available online or in the record of a 1973 Senate hearing.

The version of the table published in the journal article was then detached from the article, and characterized in testimony by a witness before the 1973 Senate hearing as the memorandum itself.

In writing to Senator Alan Cranston in 1973, Jaffe stated that “the memorandum makes clear that neither I nor the Planned Parenthood Federation of America advocates any of the specific proposals embodied in the table which go beyond voluntary actions of individual couples to space and limit births.”

In 1969, Jaffe wrote a memorandum, requested by Bernard Berelson, head of the Population Council, reviewing then-current ideas for population control from a wide range of organizations and individuals and providing a common methodology to evaluate those ideas and their potential impact. The memorandum included a table that compiled and classified many of these wide-ranging ideas. The table was included as one exhibit in an extensively-sourced 1970 journal article that reviewed then current literature on U.S. population growth and family planning.

Frederick S. Jaffe (1925–1978) was a vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and founder of what is now the Guttmacher Institute. He was an advocate for increasing the availability of family planning services in the United States. Through his publications and consultations Jaffe argued for birth control as a matter of health and human rights. He was instrumental in developing public support for federal financing of family planning programs, among them the landmark Title X of the Public Health Service Act, passed by Congress in 1970. For his contributions to public health Jaffe was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in September 1977.

Jaffe was born in Queens, New York City on November 27, 1925, and died of a heart attack on August 16, 1978 in New York City. After service in the Army Air Force (1944–1946), he completed his bachelor’s degree in Economics at Queens College in 1947. Subsequently establishing himself as a journalist, he then joined the Planned Parenthood Federation of America as associate director of its Information and Education Department, later becoming Vice President for Program Planning and Development. In 1968 he established the Center for Family Planning Program Development, the research and public policy arm of PPFA, along with Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then president of PPFA. The organization was named after Guttmacher in 1974, with Jaffe as President, and spun off from Planned Parenthood in 1977.