A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru by Raúl Necochea López

Author:Raúl Necochea López [López, Raúl Necochea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Americas, Social Science, Infrastructure, Health & Fitness, General, South America, Women's Studies, Health Care Issues, Nonfiction, Health, Gender Studies, History, Social & Cultural Studies, Business & Economics, Health & Well Being
ISBN: 9781469618098
Google: jpwVogEACAAJ
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Local and the Regional in Population Policymaking

The earliest historiography of family planning in Latin America tends to focus on how foreign agents, mainly from the United States, carved a niche for family planning in a hostile territory dominated by the Catholic Church, conservative military forces, and left-leaning nationalists, all of whom allegedly deplored birth control as an imperialist tool.100 This downplays the crucial participation of local agents institutionalizing birth control in their own countries, something that more recent scholarship has started to address, and which this chapter does for the Peruvian case.101 In addition, somewhere between the stimulating focus on the peculiarities of each Latin American nation and the undeniable influence of U.S. ideas and money on post–World War II population policies, there is a vast, underexplored, and rich territory of inquiry that we have only begun to consider, one that emphasizes the common features of the region in response to the conundrum of determining the place of birth control programs within national development strategies.

Even before the U.S. government became interested in funding family planning worldwide, a number of organizations existed with that goal in mind, and, although linked by similar ideas and personal connections, they also competed to expand their programs in Latin America. The Ford Foundation, with its emphasis on social science research, was more successful persuading the Peruvian political elite than was the Population Council, which privileged more direct interventions. Competition persisted after the U.S. government entered the fray, most emblematically between the USAID’s pressure to fund birth control as an element of maternal and child health services and PAHO’s reluctance to do this. The contest was as much about bragging rights as it was about advancing different visions of the role of birth control in the political life of the developing world. Should research about the need and applicability of contraception policies take primacy over action? Would too great a focus on contraception detract from the provision of other important services? How much should policymakers know before making decisions on these vital issues? Nations such as Colombia, Chile, and Honduras answered these questions differently than Peru or Argentina did, yet all Latin American countries faced a similar set of problems charting paths toward greater socioeconomic development.

The emergence of the above questions depended on the previous establishment of a link between state-directed strategic planning and national development. Could governments really navigate the complex path toward socioeconomic improvements? Institutions such as the UN’s Economic and Social Council, its Population Commission, CELADE, the Alliance for Progress, and, in the Peruvian case, CAEM and the INP, answered in the affirmative. Two significant points of convergence, relevant for all of Latin America, were the emphasis on training the first generation of Latin American demographers and the diffusion of the idea that underplanned population growth and migrations could hold a nation’s progress back. Again, the responses of regional leaders to the latter realization varied and evolved over time.

As they had since the eighteenth century, Latin American governments in the mid-twentieth century

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