For Recognition and Liberation of Woman
Our countries of Latin America have been subjected to a population control policy directly supervised by the American "guardian institutions". The great majority of women have been subjected to contraception (and sterilization) without their full knowledge and consent. These are the women who belong to the most dispossessed classes, with the fewest possibilities for access to knowledge, women of ethnic groups who, depending on the country, are under the influence of traditional cultures most of which, in turn, recognize women solely in their capacity to reproduce. These cultures reject the autonomy and self determination of woman, her social role, her capacity for pleasure, her desire or lack of desire for maternity, her body as language and expression of herself.
Women are being crushed between the dominant interests, whether foreign or national, and the atavistic beliefs carried by their compatriots and themselves, as well as by the influence of the system of religious power. The latter can be at times ambiguous and fluctuating in favor of a clearly repressive policy, acting as agents of power which decide and impose new ways of living, crushing traditional culture considered to be "uncivilized". This it does by means o' moral judgement, i.e., by favoring the institutionalization the nuclear family as a pillar of society corresponding to! interest of the bourgeois state.
It would be good to make a rapid analysis of the course religious power in Latin America: The Roman Catholic religion installed itself with the colonizers and participated the extermination of the indigenous peoples by means o system of ideological persecution, and introduced ' Inquisition, predecessor of political torture in Latin American
Women were always held back in a state of resignation fatalism and guilt and considered as essentially negative beings. In order to justify the negation of our bodies and • right to pleasure, our social role was reduced to that mother, nun or prostitute. The only possibility of dignity was and is through indissoluble chains, procreation conformity. Beside the traditional Church, accomplice in Interest of the state, there are priests who denounce violation of human rights and the antinatalist projects some sectors this is a tardy phenomenon of expiation repentance and in others it signifies a real raised consciousness openly participating in the class struggles in Latin America.
In general, we are reduced to statistics of births or demographic control for the sake of the economic and social progress of the developing countries. What development? For whom? These are the questions.
Women are obliged to have abortions in the worst hygienic and psychological conditions in spite of the emphasis placed on population control without any concern for a women's desire or lack of it for maternity, nor in raising any consciousness in this aspect of a woman's life inasmuch as the concern is to slow down population growth in a selective way, eliminating the indigenous elements and favoring the conformist middle classes, or increasing the birth of those sectors not as dangerous for the economic interests of the dominating class.
In no case does this facilitate raising the consciousness of women as active participants in a free social process of choosing and directing their condition as women.
Abortion is not legally accepted in any Latin American country whose laws are dictated by patria potestas and which, on the contrary, include the institutionalization of violence, usually practiced legally at the level of political torture. In these countries the right to terminate voluntarily a pregnancy does not exist.
All this has brought immense masses of women from the urban and peasant sectors, in many case, to a sure death.with the use "in extremis" of curretage in the course of serious blood poisoning or to the arbitrary practice of sterilization with the ancestral method of blackmail in the relationship of colonizer-colonized. Many women find themselves sterile without having known what it means to be fertile.
The various methods of contraception which are applied on a mass scale are not followed up adequately in order to prevent the harm which comes from their incorrect, ignorant or abusive use, as in the case of oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices. These methods are applied without any consideration for the real equilibrium of the ethnic and social groups in question. Their application is often based on deceit and the use of the ignorance and the lack of adequate and rational systems of social protection for the women faced with the abuses of medical ideology.
Peasant women and women of the urban proletariat are sterilized in silence because of the unilateral decision to wipe out underdeveloped genes which are the product of malnutrition, hunger and exploitation. The same "protectors" who make this decision are the direct agents of this exploitation and malnutrition.
Our contribution to this meeting on the subject of contraception and abortion includes a denunciation of the anti-natalist projects in Latin America where the myth of the population explosion is used in order to preserve the status quo of capitalism which is based on the exploitation of the masses of people. The population explosion becomes an issue from the moment in which the exploited and oppressed population, hungry and without work, starts to become more and more conscious of its condition, and especially, younger and younger. One characteristic of the Latin American population is that a large part of it is under 15 years old. This phenomenon provokes fear in the regimes of the industrialized countries whose population, on the contrary, is becoming older and older. There are many examples of the phenomenon of population control. We will cite a few here.
In Guatemala, 49% of the population control methods used in 1974 was the sterilization of women on operating or delivery tables. This statistic is from the Guatemalan Institute of Social Security.
Today, in Bolivia, a carefully planned operation of blatant genocide is being carried out with the participation of private North American entities.Three million dollars has been put into the program for propaganda alone and another eight million dollars for carrying it out. Numerous organizations are operating in complete freedom: PROFAM (Pro-familia) and CENAFA (Centro Nacional de Familia) have established health stations in the rural areas where sterilizations are carried out on both sexes, vasectomies, tubal ligations and the free distribution of oral contraceptives. Sterilizing substances have been found at times mixed with' food offered to the population. Linked to this anti-natalist program, the Federal Republic of Germany has proposed the project of the emigration of white South Africans to Latin America. The Bolivian government is the only one who has accepted this project for the emigration of 150,000 white South African colonizers, the majority of Dutch or German origin. Without doubt, countries such as Great Britain are trying to find an easy solution to the problem posed by the exclusion of whites from Southern Africa. On the other hand, the Bolivian government and the United States are interested in strengthening a reactionary, conservative and especially an economically powerful bourgeoisie in the heart of the continent. We condemn this and ask all the democratic forces to speak out in order to prevent a most condemnable and outrageous exportation of Apartheid.
In Chile, the population control program carried out by the Military Junta since it took power in 1973 has as its objective the immense reduction of the poor and unemployed in order to attain an "objective" population. The project, naturally, is presented as humanitarian and social, but its sustaining ideology is still Neo-Darwinism: the survival of the fittest and the reduction of those strata which could pose a danger for the established power.
At present family planning receives 40%of the health budget in Chile, which represents the largest contribution to family planning in all of Latin America. At the same time, the system of social security has been dismantled in favor of the maintenance of private clinics.
What is prohibited in the United States is good for Chile. For example, an experiment was carried out on more than 700 Chilean women using chemical injections for long-lasting contraception. The injections administered contain a dangerous product, prohibited in the United States which causes serious congenital defects and permanent sterilization. Cancer of the uterus has appeared as a consequence of this drug.
The birth control program is being carried out by APROFA (Associacion chilena por la proteccion de la familial) whose personnel has been trained by the North American inspired and activated Pan-american Health Organization. During the May 1975 meeting of the World Health Organization, the Minister of Health of the Chilean Junta obtained 15 million dollars for the program, which represents half the amount appropriated by WHO for this type of project. For those running this program, birth control rather than health services represents the most adequate form of reducing mortality among women.
Similar situations are found in the rest of Latin America and are being systematically denounced by organized women in Latin America.
For solidarity with the struggle for the demands of the women of the world
For mutual understanding of our problems.
For the unity of our movements.
Towards the conquest of our full rights.
Latin American Women's Group
(Paper presented at the International Feminist Meeting in
Paris, May 1977. Translated from the Spanish by Isis