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

KARINA FELITTI

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, EE.UU.

Conferencia; 14th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women; 2008

The Berkshire Conference

The intensive growth of the world population during the second postwar expanded the fear of an imminent depletion of natural resources and the destabilization of the capitalist system. In the Cold War context, to contain the effects of the population bomb in the Third World, some countries, specially the United States, began to foment the implementation of family planning programs. In Argentina, the diagnoses that associated population growth with underdevelopment were rejected and, bearing in mind the population fall in the country, in the sixties, family planning programs were faced by private associations and not by the State. In this context, the reception of the birth control pills generated greats debates between traditionalist groups that rejected them in defence of the catholic nation, the morality and the family, the revolutionary left that saw them as a new tool of imperialism and women that were waiting for an efficient birth control method for a long time and didn’t want to loose this opportunity.  This paper analyses the debates about sexuality, reproduction and gender that the reception of the pill generated in Buenos Aires. We focus in the discussion that took place in the medical field and in the way that de media, specially women magazines, present and extended the scientifically discussion into the public opinion during the sixties.