Catholic Church's Influence On Latin American Eugenics
Eugenics is known for its European presence. It, however, shaped the health care and legal practices of every region of the world, including Latin America. As Nancy Leys Stepan said of its reach in The Hour of Eugenics:
Hardly a single area in Latin America had in fact remained completely untouched by Eugenics by the 1930s.... [The movements] were led by medical doctors in obstetrics, child health, and mental hygiene, and their goals were to propagandize, and apply, the new science of Eugenics rather than to carry out research in heredity and health (Stepan 55).
Latin American Eugenics was unique. Rather than using sterilization and extermination to control its population, it combined Neo-Lamarckism, the idea that changes to one’s environment …show more content…
could improve one’s offspring, and puericulture, the health reforms which sprang from Lamarckism, with sterilization and birth control. These were influenced simultaneously by the pronatalist French biologists and the racist ideals of those in Europe and the United States. This combination of theories came from a conflict in the wants and moral values of three prominent groups, and the need for the Latin American government to implement a system which meet the demands of each of these powers. Latin America implemented Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics to balance the wants and needs of Latin American elites, the Roman Catholic Church, and the people to emphasize health reform over sterilization practices; where this did not happen, Eugenics ultimately failed. Elites held the greatest influence over the science and politics of Eugenics. They were the scientists and politicians of Latin America. Until the 1930s, the education required for social mobility in Latin America was inaccessible to most [Latin America had retained a stable, though premodern hierarchy, with the, as Kelly Hoffman and Miguel Angel Centeno observed, “absurdly wealthy” at the top, and the “very poor” majority at the bottom (Hoffman 363)]. European culture, ideals, and the desire to be or become white influenced the upper class, who were educated more often in European countries than in their own. The Europeans saw both the elites and the people of Latin America as “racially degenerate”, attributing the tropical environment of the continent to impurity, corruption, and disease. These attributions ingrained racist ideals into the minds of both the elites and educated groups. One such circle, the ufanismo, thought that the “whitening” of Latin America would launch the continent as a world power and resolve the issues of poverty, disease, and undereducation. The elites’ want to become more European contributed to the already strong racial tensions of countries such as Brazil and Argentina. As Michael George Hanchard describes these:
The racial composition of Brazil brought consternation to many Brazilian elites.... Comtean positivists and Eugenicists, partners in social alchemy. confronted Brazilian elites with racialist formulations of its own. If Brazil was to be modern, with the non-white hue of its people, it could not possibly be like Europe (Radcliff 35).
The elites in groups such as the Creoles thought that “whiteness” was a gradation of skin tones; where there was dark skin, there was no prosperity. Most immigrants to Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American countries where Spanish or Italian - darker skinned; Anglo-saxons, who the elites thought had traits that could make Latin America more European, were the minority (Spitta 683). The increasingly diverse population of Latin America was thought to threaten its racial purity; As Arturo R. Rossi, president of the Argentinean Association of Biotypology, Eugenics, and Social Medicine in the 1930s describes it, the purpose of Eugenics was to “protect Latin America against its own polymorphism” (Stepan 89). Elites thought that birth control, sterilization, or any policy that aimed to homogenize Latin America would put them on par with Europe.
The Roman Catholic Church was horrified by negative Eugenics.
Birth control, sterilization, and any other way to control a population, was antithetical to their philosophy. Especially in the predominately Catholic continent of Latin America, a decline in birth rate meant a decline in membership to the Church (“Eugenics”). In fear of this, Pope Pius XI promulgated Casti Connubii in 1930. It banned sterilization, mass-genocide of the unfit, and all methods of birth control: methods which the elites of Latin America encouraged. The encyclical was targeted towards Eugenic “extremists”, such as those in Germany, several other European countries, and the United States, who, because of fascism and increasing secularization, did not end their policies as a result (Kelves …show more content…
67).
The want of the Roman Catholic Church to stay away from negative Eugenics influenced the opinions of the Latin American People greatly. Spanish colonization, and Spanish missionaries catholocized Latin America from the 16th to 19th centuries; countries such as Argentina were almost universally so (“Eugenics”). Despite this devotion to Roman Catholicism, the Latin American people, in a similar vein to the elites, held racist attitudes towards ethnic outsiders, groups who were not of their race. However, some of these groups, marginalized under Eugenics, still agreed with, and even advocated for, these policies (Rodriguez 375). The promises of health care and educational reform by the government to the people gave popular opinion a positive bias towards Eugenics. Leftists and rightists, women’s groups, and Mulattos, such as the Brazilian Juliano Moreira, advocated for practices which implicitly discriminated against them through restricting marriage and requiring prenuptial testing among minorities (Stepan 77-79).
Governments in Latin America, meanwhile, intended Eugenics as a means of population control. In the aftermath of WWI, countries became concerned about national regeneration, that their populations were not large enough to sustain another war, and adopted pronatalist attitudes. Rather than using sterilization and extermination, however, governments reformed medicine, psychiatry, healthcare, and obstetrics (Helmreich). They did so through providing nutrition and medicine to pregnant women and newborns and passing legislation which prevented marriage among those deemed unfit. The governments of Latin America sought for a cheap and efficient way to control their populations which also satisfied the wants of both Catholics and elites. Much of Eugenics policy was aimed at women, criminals, and marginalized groups (such as natives and the Brazilian Mestizos), rather than the entire population. A puer et culture, which concerned the welfare of infants and their mothers, developed. In Argentina, the government provided mothers and their children with nutrition, vaccination, and other types of welfare. This intended to prevent the endemic diseases which had plagued many parts of Latin America. But these were a result of rampant poverty, poor living conditions, a lack of clean water, and little knowledge of hygiene practices, rather than the care of pregnant women. The implementation of maternal healthcare reform did little to lower the rates of endemic diseases (“Eugenics”).
In government, Europe influenced the implementation of Lamarckism the most. Until the 1920s, France was at the forefront of Latin American science. French was seen as the language of the educated; most papers in the continent, if not in Spanish, were distributed in French. Until the 1920s, aspiring students of medicine and biology in Latin America traveled to Paris to study under the auspices of scientists, such as Adolphe Pinard and Jean-Baptist Lamarck, in lieu of Latin American universities (Stepan 72). One student of Pinard, Eusebio Hernandez, published a book on puericulture prefaced by the Cuban secretary of health. Puericulture was the Eugenic rearing of children; if mothers were cared for before giving birth, their children would become genetically “better” (Outtes 142). The goal of Hernandez’s book was to spread homiculture (a phrase he himself termed) throughout Latin America (Turda 38). Homiculture encompassed puericulture and included the other disciplines of patrimatriculture (the care of a child’s parents), matrifeticulture (the care of pregnant women), progonaculture (the care of reproductive organs), and post-genitoculture (the care of children) in it (Stepan 79).
By the 1910s, Eusebio Hernandez’s ideas came to fruition. Argentina and Brazil created the Argentine Eugenics Society and Sao Paulo Eugenics Society in 1918. Both mimicked the French Eugenics society in structure and ideology. Mexico created the Mexican Society for Puericulture at about the same time.
Two other movements - Darwinism and Weissmannism, competed against Lamarckism for attention in Latin America. Darwinism was the idea that, through natural selection, a species could evolve over generations. Weissmannism was the idea that no acquired trait could be inherited. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany relied on these theories in their development of Eugenics; the social conditions of Latin America, however, caused the continent to skew towards Lamarckism. The elites, the government, and the people of Latin America wanted to use Eugenics as a means to become equal, as a society, to Europe and the United States. Weissmannism and Darwinism provided a pessimistic outlook; the two theories denied that acquired traits could be passed onto future generations; Latin America could not become genetically “whiter” by changing health and social conditions (Stepan 213-218). Germany and the United States, used both Weissmannism and Darwinism in defense of sterilization practices and other methods of birth control banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Although Latin American biologists and politicians debated the usefulness of these two theories, Weissmannism and Darwinism did not spread to the extent of Lamarckism. The largest counterpoint to Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics in Latin America was the Mexican Eugenics Movement.
Eugenics entered Mexico as puericulture. As early as 1903, La Gaceta Medica de Mexico, the official publication of Mexico’s National Academy of Medicine, published on puericulture. At the beginning of the 20th century, pronatalist reformers, as in the French movement that inspired it, sought to reduce infant mortality, boost population density, establish public clinics, and monitor the development of the population through gathering biomedical statistics. At first, Mexican Eugenics policies were labelled as “social hygiene services” dominated by the School Hygiene Service and Infant Hygiene Service. The First Congress of the Mexican Child, in 1921, consisted of delegates, doctors and nurses, and social engineers from these services (Stern). In Veracruz was the first piece of legislation aimed at the legalization of sterilization, created by Salvador Mendoza in conjunction with the Mexican Eugenics Society. It aimed to give justification for a new Section on Eugenics and Mental Hygiene, which would have focused on hereditary disease, criminality, prostitution, alcoholism, and mental disorders. It legalized the sterilization for “clear cases of idiocy”, the “degenerate mad”, the “incurably ill” and “delinquents.” The law passed marginally at the First Mexican Congress of the
Child.
Mexico had a system of Eugenics which discriminated against both the indigenous and mestizo populations. After the formation of the Mexican Society for Racial Improvement, elites, politicians, and scientists alike debated whether or not racial mixing was beneficial to the population (Stepan 132). Proponents of racial mixing, such as José Vasconcelos, author of La Raza Cosmica, argued that Mexican racial diversity would lead Mexico towards a “Cosmic Race”. This race combined the best elements of each ethnic group and would, according to Vasconcelos, result in a complete and perfect society in Mexico. To the contrary, Eugenics legislation promoted racial segregation in reproduction. For example, the Chinese were prohibited from inter-ethnic marriages, and sterilization laws unproportionally targeted indigenous peoples (Helmreich).
These laws were detrimental to Mexican Eugenics. The Mexican people, overwhelmingly Catholic, were adverse to sterilization practices, and there was equal debate among biologists and politicians. This prevented stricter legislation, such as euthanasia, from passing (Radcliff 266-269).
Another failure the Mexican Eugenics Movement was education. Sexual education, especially classes on puericulture and Eugenic hygiene, were supported mostly by feminist groups. Feminists in Mexican society were seen as “strange” in their ideas, unrelatable to a conservative population. Eugenic education, as a result, was never fully implemented into Mexican Eugenics (Stepan 188). Eugenic legislation in Latin America which didn’t fit the needs of the elites and the people failed in that they supported a minority position above popular opinion.
Eugenics in Latin America was motivated by a desire to become a society equal to the Europeans on the elite’s part, a desire to prevent sterilization and birth control on the Church’s part, and a desire to both adhere to the Roman Catholic Church and encourage public health care and education reform on the people’s part. Neo-Lamarckism and puericulture was seen as efficient and cheap ways to meet these wants by the governments of Latin America. Although they did provide nutrition, immunization, and health care to women and children, and attempted to educate their populations, it did little to eliminate endemic diseases. It did little to homogenize Latin America. It did little to make health care and education accessible to a large part of the population. Government compromised their ultimate goal - to improve Latin America - in favor of pleasing three powerful groups, and even then, could not completely adhere to the wants of any. Ultimately, Eugenics failed.
Hardly a single area in Latin America had in fact remained completely untouched by Eugenics by the 1930s.... [The movements] were led by medical doctors in obstetrics, child health, and mental hygiene, and their goals were to propagandize, and apply, the new science of Eugenics rather than to carry out research in heredity and health (Stepan 55).
Latin American Eugenics was unique. Rather than using sterilization and extermination to control its population, it combined Neo-Lamarckism, the idea that changes to one’s environment …show more content…
could improve one’s offspring, and puericulture, the health reforms which sprang from Lamarckism, with sterilization and birth control. These were influenced simultaneously by the pronatalist French biologists and the racist ideals of those in Europe and the United States. This combination of theories came from a conflict in the wants and moral values of three prominent groups, and the need for the Latin American government to implement a system which meet the demands of each of these powers. Latin America implemented Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics to balance the wants and needs of Latin American elites, the Roman Catholic Church, and the people to emphasize health reform over sterilization practices; where this did not happen, Eugenics ultimately failed. Elites held the greatest influence over the science and politics of Eugenics. They were the scientists and politicians of Latin America. Until the 1930s, the education required for social mobility in Latin America was inaccessible to most [Latin America had retained a stable, though premodern hierarchy, with the, as Kelly Hoffman and Miguel Angel Centeno observed, “absurdly wealthy” at the top, and the “very poor” majority at the bottom (Hoffman 363)]. European culture, ideals, and the desire to be or become white influenced the upper class, who were educated more often in European countries than in their own. The Europeans saw both the elites and the people of Latin America as “racially degenerate”, attributing the tropical environment of the continent to impurity, corruption, and disease. These attributions ingrained racist ideals into the minds of both the elites and educated groups. One such circle, the ufanismo, thought that the “whitening” of Latin America would launch the continent as a world power and resolve the issues of poverty, disease, and undereducation. The elites’ want to become more European contributed to the already strong racial tensions of countries such as Brazil and Argentina. As Michael George Hanchard describes these:
The racial composition of Brazil brought consternation to many Brazilian elites.... Comtean positivists and Eugenicists, partners in social alchemy. confronted Brazilian elites with racialist formulations of its own. If Brazil was to be modern, with the non-white hue of its people, it could not possibly be like Europe (Radcliff 35).
The elites in groups such as the Creoles thought that “whiteness” was a gradation of skin tones; where there was dark skin, there was no prosperity. Most immigrants to Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American countries where Spanish or Italian - darker skinned; Anglo-saxons, who the elites thought had traits that could make Latin America more European, were the minority (Spitta 683). The increasingly diverse population of Latin America was thought to threaten its racial purity; As Arturo R. Rossi, president of the Argentinean Association of Biotypology, Eugenics, and Social Medicine in the 1930s describes it, the purpose of Eugenics was to “protect Latin America against its own polymorphism” (Stepan 89). Elites thought that birth control, sterilization, or any policy that aimed to homogenize Latin America would put them on par with Europe.
The Roman Catholic Church was horrified by negative Eugenics.
Birth control, sterilization, and any other way to control a population, was antithetical to their philosophy. Especially in the predominately Catholic continent of Latin America, a decline in birth rate meant a decline in membership to the Church (“Eugenics”). In fear of this, Pope Pius XI promulgated Casti Connubii in 1930. It banned sterilization, mass-genocide of the unfit, and all methods of birth control: methods which the elites of Latin America encouraged. The encyclical was targeted towards Eugenic “extremists”, such as those in Germany, several other European countries, and the United States, who, because of fascism and increasing secularization, did not end their policies as a result (Kelves …show more content…
67).
The want of the Roman Catholic Church to stay away from negative Eugenics influenced the opinions of the Latin American People greatly. Spanish colonization, and Spanish missionaries catholocized Latin America from the 16th to 19th centuries; countries such as Argentina were almost universally so (“Eugenics”). Despite this devotion to Roman Catholicism, the Latin American people, in a similar vein to the elites, held racist attitudes towards ethnic outsiders, groups who were not of their race. However, some of these groups, marginalized under Eugenics, still agreed with, and even advocated for, these policies (Rodriguez 375). The promises of health care and educational reform by the government to the people gave popular opinion a positive bias towards Eugenics. Leftists and rightists, women’s groups, and Mulattos, such as the Brazilian Juliano Moreira, advocated for practices which implicitly discriminated against them through restricting marriage and requiring prenuptial testing among minorities (Stepan 77-79).
Governments in Latin America, meanwhile, intended Eugenics as a means of population control. In the aftermath of WWI, countries became concerned about national regeneration, that their populations were not large enough to sustain another war, and adopted pronatalist attitudes. Rather than using sterilization and extermination, however, governments reformed medicine, psychiatry, healthcare, and obstetrics (Helmreich). They did so through providing nutrition and medicine to pregnant women and newborns and passing legislation which prevented marriage among those deemed unfit. The governments of Latin America sought for a cheap and efficient way to control their populations which also satisfied the wants of both Catholics and elites. Much of Eugenics policy was aimed at women, criminals, and marginalized groups (such as natives and the Brazilian Mestizos), rather than the entire population. A puer et culture, which concerned the welfare of infants and their mothers, developed. In Argentina, the government provided mothers and their children with nutrition, vaccination, and other types of welfare. This intended to prevent the endemic diseases which had plagued many parts of Latin America. But these were a result of rampant poverty, poor living conditions, a lack of clean water, and little knowledge of hygiene practices, rather than the care of pregnant women. The implementation of maternal healthcare reform did little to lower the rates of endemic diseases (“Eugenics”).
In government, Europe influenced the implementation of Lamarckism the most. Until the 1920s, France was at the forefront of Latin American science. French was seen as the language of the educated; most papers in the continent, if not in Spanish, were distributed in French. Until the 1920s, aspiring students of medicine and biology in Latin America traveled to Paris to study under the auspices of scientists, such as Adolphe Pinard and Jean-Baptist Lamarck, in lieu of Latin American universities (Stepan 72). One student of Pinard, Eusebio Hernandez, published a book on puericulture prefaced by the Cuban secretary of health. Puericulture was the Eugenic rearing of children; if mothers were cared for before giving birth, their children would become genetically “better” (Outtes 142). The goal of Hernandez’s book was to spread homiculture (a phrase he himself termed) throughout Latin America (Turda 38). Homiculture encompassed puericulture and included the other disciplines of patrimatriculture (the care of a child’s parents), matrifeticulture (the care of pregnant women), progonaculture (the care of reproductive organs), and post-genitoculture (the care of children) in it (Stepan 79).
By the 1910s, Eusebio Hernandez’s ideas came to fruition. Argentina and Brazil created the Argentine Eugenics Society and Sao Paulo Eugenics Society in 1918. Both mimicked the French Eugenics society in structure and ideology. Mexico created the Mexican Society for Puericulture at about the same time.
Two other movements - Darwinism and Weissmannism, competed against Lamarckism for attention in Latin America. Darwinism was the idea that, through natural selection, a species could evolve over generations. Weissmannism was the idea that no acquired trait could be inherited. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany relied on these theories in their development of Eugenics; the social conditions of Latin America, however, caused the continent to skew towards Lamarckism. The elites, the government, and the people of Latin America wanted to use Eugenics as a means to become equal, as a society, to Europe and the United States. Weissmannism and Darwinism provided a pessimistic outlook; the two theories denied that acquired traits could be passed onto future generations; Latin America could not become genetically “whiter” by changing health and social conditions (Stepan 213-218). Germany and the United States, used both Weissmannism and Darwinism in defense of sterilization practices and other methods of birth control banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Although Latin American biologists and politicians debated the usefulness of these two theories, Weissmannism and Darwinism did not spread to the extent of Lamarckism. The largest counterpoint to Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics in Latin America was the Mexican Eugenics Movement.
Eugenics entered Mexico as puericulture. As early as 1903, La Gaceta Medica de Mexico, the official publication of Mexico’s National Academy of Medicine, published on puericulture. At the beginning of the 20th century, pronatalist reformers, as in the French movement that inspired it, sought to reduce infant mortality, boost population density, establish public clinics, and monitor the development of the population through gathering biomedical statistics. At first, Mexican Eugenics policies were labelled as “social hygiene services” dominated by the School Hygiene Service and Infant Hygiene Service. The First Congress of the Mexican Child, in 1921, consisted of delegates, doctors and nurses, and social engineers from these services (Stern). In Veracruz was the first piece of legislation aimed at the legalization of sterilization, created by Salvador Mendoza in conjunction with the Mexican Eugenics Society. It aimed to give justification for a new Section on Eugenics and Mental Hygiene, which would have focused on hereditary disease, criminality, prostitution, alcoholism, and mental disorders. It legalized the sterilization for “clear cases of idiocy”, the “degenerate mad”, the “incurably ill” and “delinquents.” The law passed marginally at the First Mexican Congress of the
Child.
Mexico had a system of Eugenics which discriminated against both the indigenous and mestizo populations. After the formation of the Mexican Society for Racial Improvement, elites, politicians, and scientists alike debated whether or not racial mixing was beneficial to the population (Stepan 132). Proponents of racial mixing, such as José Vasconcelos, author of La Raza Cosmica, argued that Mexican racial diversity would lead Mexico towards a “Cosmic Race”. This race combined the best elements of each ethnic group and would, according to Vasconcelos, result in a complete and perfect society in Mexico. To the contrary, Eugenics legislation promoted racial segregation in reproduction. For example, the Chinese were prohibited from inter-ethnic marriages, and sterilization laws unproportionally targeted indigenous peoples (Helmreich).
These laws were detrimental to Mexican Eugenics. The Mexican people, overwhelmingly Catholic, were adverse to sterilization practices, and there was equal debate among biologists and politicians. This prevented stricter legislation, such as euthanasia, from passing (Radcliff 266-269).
Another failure the Mexican Eugenics Movement was education. Sexual education, especially classes on puericulture and Eugenic hygiene, were supported mostly by feminist groups. Feminists in Mexican society were seen as “strange” in their ideas, unrelatable to a conservative population. Eugenic education, as a result, was never fully implemented into Mexican Eugenics (Stepan 188). Eugenic legislation in Latin America which didn’t fit the needs of the elites and the people failed in that they supported a minority position above popular opinion.
Eugenics in Latin America was motivated by a desire to become a society equal to the Europeans on the elite’s part, a desire to prevent sterilization and birth control on the Church’s part, and a desire to both adhere to the Roman Catholic Church and encourage public health care and education reform on the people’s part. Neo-Lamarckism and puericulture was seen as efficient and cheap ways to meet these wants by the governments of Latin America. Although they did provide nutrition, immunization, and health care to women and children, and attempted to educate their populations, it did little to eliminate endemic diseases. It did little to homogenize Latin America. It did little to make health care and education accessible to a large part of the population. Government compromised their ultimate goal - to improve Latin America - in favor of pleasing three powerful groups, and even then, could not completely adhere to the wants of any. Ultimately, Eugenics failed.