Imposing Motherhood: Contraception and Abortion under Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983)

KARINA FELITTI

Toronto

Conferencia; 16th Berkshire Conference on Women s History; 2014

Universidad de Toronto

On March 24th 1976 a military coup de état overthrew the third Peronist government (1973-1976) and established a large scale repression operation over the Argentinean society. Through abductions, tortures, disappearances and murders, the military government planned to eliminate all resistance to its economic, social and political model. While the dictatorship destroyed these families it promoted another model of family, based on legal marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality and reproduction, with traditional gender roles well defined. Parents and especially mothers had an important mission in the war against subversion, controlling their children and keeping them away from Marxism. Couples were also encouraged to reject contraception and abortion despite a new context of world population growth. The persistent low birth rates were considered a threat to Argentinean sovereignty as well as in defiance of the values of the Roman Catholic Church. These ideas were also important for many guerrilla movements, some of merged their leftwing ideology to their Christian beliefs. These groups saw the pill and the ongoing sexual revolution as bourgeois distractions from social and political revolution and a new tool of imperialist domination. In their mind, the revolution of the pill- could undermine the Real Revolution. In this paper I present the military policies that controlled birth control (family planning, contraception and abortion) and their implementation, gathered from the analysis of legislation and public documents, as well as the testimonies of medical staff involved in family planning activities at the time. I also study the military discourse surrounding parenthood/motherhood and its representation in the allied press. For the second part, I rely on the analysis in documents from left-wing organizations, the Montoneros and PRT/ERP, and the testimonies from militants that have been reproduced in various publications and filmed by Memoria Abierta.