Birthrate, Sovereignty, and Development: The Reception of the Birth Control Pill in Buenos Aires in the Sixties

KARINA FELITTI

Wenn die Chemie stimmt': Geschlechterbeziehungen und Geburtenkontrolle im Zeitalter der 'Pille'. Gender relations and birth control in the age of the pill

Wallstein-Publishing House

Lugar: Göttingen; Año: 2016; p. 297 - 317

During the 1960s, Buenos Aires confirmed its reputation as a modern city that witnessed Cultural Revolution with the latest avant-garde trends and new social behaviors in society at large. The dynamics of daily life among couples and between parents and children changed dramatically based on more democratic family relations, an increase in consensual unions, more tolerance of premarital sex, and a conscious policy of birth control, especially in the middle and higher classes. In this article I analyze how international debates on population, sovereignty, and development resonated in Latin America and particularly in Buenos Aires, focusing in the medical community and the media. I look at some of the debates at the Buenos Aires Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an association that has gathered the most outstanding specialists since the early twentieth century, becoming an important referent for physicians in the field. I will also look at how two mainstream magazines, like Primera Plana and Claudia, dealt with the issue of population and birth control.