From The Economist's review of "Fatal Misconception" by Michael Connelly (Harvard University Press):

All too easily arrogance slides into inhumanity. Much of the evil done in the name of slowing population growth had its roots in an uneasy coalition between feminists, humanitarians and environmentalists, who wished to help the unwillingly fecund, and the racists, eugenicists and militarists who wished to see particular patterns of reproduction, regardless of the desires of those involved. The first group knew perfectly well that economic development, education and rights for women were very effective in reducing birth rates. But the second regarded promoting these ends as too slow and expensive. And even suggesting them risked shattering the coalition: among the hardliners were many who found the tendency of educated women to have fewer children almost as problematic as that of uneducated ones to breed prolifically.

As the world population soared, the population controllers came to believe they were fighting a war, and there would be collateral damage. Millions of intra-uterine contraceptive devices were exported to poor countries although they were known to cause infections and sterility. “Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things,” said a participant at a conference on the devices organised in 1962 by the Population Council, a research institute founded by John D. Rockefeller, “particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilising but not lethal.” In 1969 Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank, said he was reluctant to finance health care “unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.”

[...]

Mr Connelly's most devastating critique of population control is not that it destroyed lives, or was based on imperialist or eugenic ideas, but that it did not work. In country after country—even in China—birth rates were already falling when the government began implementing more coercive policies. Furthermore, statistical estimates suggest that as much as 90% of the reason that women have families of a particular size is simply because that is the number of children they want.

I disagree with the view that the most devastating critique is that population control policies didn't work, but the review is most compelling and quite well done.