This paper is about the origins of contraceptive services in South Africa. It is based on research in official as well as non-governmental organizations’ archives located at Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, South Africa. It is derived from my manuscript on the politics of birth control in South Africa from 1910-1939, which has been accepted for publication by Palgrave Macmillan in the United Kingdom and is also under review for co-publication by the University of South Africa Press. The paper argues that in common with the rest of the British Empire, South Africa experienced the first round of a national debate about birth control in the inter-war era. In 1938, the central state awarded the extra-state birth-control movement a significant grant-in-aid that was renewed annually, decades before Great Britain and the other dominion and colonial governments in the Empire subsidized contraceptive services. The paper argues that, in keeping with Western nations and their empires in the early twentieth century, in South Africa there was intense anxiety about whites’ ability to maintain imperial rule. Thus, during the inter-war era, the central state supported contraceptive services in a bid to regulate the fertility of ‘poor whites’, who were viewed as a threat to the quality of the ruling minority white ‘race’. Elites’ preoccupation with poor whites’ high fertility and putatively low quality led the state to endorse and financially support accessible contraceptive services. This differs sharply from reproductive health policy under apartheid, when the state and elites focused their anxiety on black population growth and their efforts at curbing black, instead of poor white, fertility. This culminated in a population-control policy from the 1970s to the end of apartheid (1989), the subject of my new research.