A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru by Raúl Necochea López (review)

This excellent study presents the complexity of the subject of family planning, intimately linked to ideas of progress, modernization, international relations, and the changing roles of men and women of different backgrounds in Peruvian society. Necochea consults an impressive range of archival sources and oral histories to show that families were, indeed, not the key decision makers in family-planning strategies. Instead, physicians, politicians, social reformers, and priests became the movers and shakers who promoted family stability. Family planning, including the state-led or reform-driven initiatives to strengthen families, has a history that is sometimes, but not always, linked to birth control and to concerns about family size. Necochea’s analysis of officials’ changing interpretations of Peru’s demographic needs reveals that Peru did not easily fit the dominant models proposed by population planners in the United States, who often equated large families with poverty and lack of economic development and who promoted population control, especially after World War II. Peruvians, meanwhile, linked family size to family planning and to the future of their nation in complex and changing ways.

In the early twentieth century, Peruvian officials sought to increase population size, initially following the path of countries in the Latin American Southern Cone, attracting European immigrants to improve the quantity and alleged quality of national populations. When, disappointingly, few immigrants chose to settle in Peru, local reformers paid more attention to children, mothers, and families. Health officials also tested scientific concepts that originated in Europe, such as puericulture (the care of unborn children and infants) and eugenics, lured by their alleged potential to prevent national decline and degeneration. New scientific models not only focused on improving the well-being of infants and mothers but also involved female reformers who either helped to fulfill the modernizing missions of political leaders or advocated family-planning strategies of their own design.

Necochea dedicates a noteworthy chapter to the personal history and political influence of Irene Silva de Santolalla, a female reformer whose remarkable rise in politics as the first female senator reveals the complex negotiations between tradition and change in Peruvian society. Her conservative politics increased her influence on the education of mothers and families. In addition to other existing measures to protect families, such as the regulation of prostitution and efforts to manage male sexuality (including moral and physical instruction), she promoted family education with a moral twist. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, Santolalla connected Catholic values to “natural” female virtues—and to the advantages of heterosexual family life—thus teaching women to protect their families and, by extension, their nation.

The dominant discourse of family-planning programs remained linked to the safeguarding of the family and women’s traditional roles as mothers, even as political leaders negotiated the degree of attention that they could give to birth control. Necochea’s study invites comparisons to other Latin American countries where the protection of the family and birth-control policies, became subjects of heated debate and where political interests could pit nation-state leaders against alleged foreign prescriptions of population management for the sake of development. Moreover, religious values and Catholic traditions could provide moral sanctioning for, or withdraw it from, family-planning measures.

Necochea’s study will incite thought-provoking discussions among scholars of twentieth-century Latin America. It will also provide food for thought to those interested in the politics of rights and health in the Americas.