In urban areas of Latin America, at least one of four pregnancies terminates in abortion. In many inner city districts the rate is even higher. At the end of their childbearing age, at least two women in five have braved serious damage to their health, disrepute, and often gruesome guilt to avoid the birth of another child. All this happens in a culture in which common law marriage and illegitimate births approach and even exceed church marriages or legitimate births, and no stigma comparable to that known in the Anglo-Saxon world attaches to either. It also happens in a culture where other people’s abandoned children are easily welcomed for upbringing in one’s own family, without any formality. Evidently a lot of people do not want to have any more children.
Most of these abortions are performed by midwives, herb-doctors and witches, except in Uruguay and Argentina, where many doctors volunteer their illegal services even to the poor. Abortion is by far the most frequent cause of death among young women. These women need an alternative to the present situation.
The conditions for increased carnage are favorable. Enough girls have already been born to insure a doubling of women of childbearing age in the very early eighties. Neither development nor revolution can prevent growing misery for an exploding and hungry population, which drifts into abulia and passivity. It would be misleading to tell a woman seeking an abortion that a rosy future is on the horizon for her child.
But also, where can politicians afford to take a strong, positive stand for either birth control or legal abortion? Only a strong-man could afford simultaneously to dare traditional Catholics who speak about sin, communists who want to out-breed the U.S. imperialists and nationalists who speak about colonizing vast unsettled expanses.
The major change in public policy must be initiated at the grass roots. Present programs, semi-clandestine, try to gain acceptance for birth control among the common people. I suggest that a major campaign demanding clear population policies should rise from the grass roots. In the following article, I explain why this campaign must be coupled with a major effort leading to critically increased political awareness. This was originally a speech given at a meeting of population experts in 1967. Since it has frequently been quoted, I have left it unchanged, fully aware that my attempt to be compact makes it difficult reading.
This speech was given some months before publication of the notorious papal encyclical on birth control. I had hoped that the Pope would speak, but wagered that he would keep silent. I lost my wager, and was disappointed. I had hoped that the Pope would speak about the ambiguity of technology, as well as the need for a more intense consciousness and love on the part of men forced by circumstances to use that technology. I had hoped that the Pope would make all men face the fact that lowered infant mortality must be accompanied by equally lowered birth rates, if we wanted to avoid widespread de-humanization, and that we were obligated as Christians to restrain self reproduction. The results of modern hygiene’s fostering physical life must be countered by the the use of modern hygiene to check its cancerous growth.
Instead the Pope came out with a document written in dead, juridical language, a document into which one can read all this, but one which lacks courage, is in bad taste, and takes the initiative away from Rome in the attempt to lead modern men in Christian humanism. This is sad.
In Latin America the population is exploding. The citizenry of Mexico is doubled every eighteen years, that of Brazil every seventeen, and that of Peru every twenty. A swelling of the lower age groups is occurring in countries where, even now, two-thirds of youth cannot complete an elementary education. The result of this is not only inferior education for the great majority, but also the growing awareness of the adult masses that they are being excluded from all the key institutions of middle class society. The brief education they receive is, in the long run, an education in dissatisfaction.
Birth control programs in Latin America generally fail because they stress the fear of poverty rather than the joy of life. An individual may employ contraception as the only defense against imminent misery—or he can choose it as a constructive means for a more human life. But there is nothing constructive in the present message of family planning. It is addressed to the same audience as the TV commercial and billboard advertising: the minority that is moving into the middle class. Today’s clients for consumer goods and contraceptives in Mexico and Brazil form an odd and a marginal lot; they are the very few who will allow their sexual patterns to be affected by an appeal involving constant consumption and material advancement.
Success in modern schools, in modern jobs, or at modern sex seem related. Such success remains the privilege of a minority in Latin America. Although this minority is drawn from all strata of society, it is selected from those “achievers” who know how to maintain the growth rate of their personal income above the national average. And this class of strivers surges into political power, providing further privilege to those already on their way to affluence. Even if family planning were practiced by this small group, it would have little impact on the over-all population growth. The “others” (which in Latin America means most) remain excluded from an equal opportunity to plan their families. Like the legal provisions for social, educational, and political equality, opportunities for the poor to practice birth control are but a mockery.
Within the present political and social context, it is impossible to induce the majority of the people to adopt birth control. Neither seduction nor current efforts at education work. To seduce effectively, the marketing of birth control would have to become more aggressive: twenty-five dollars offered for the insertion of each coil, one hundred dollars for each sterilization. To educate effectively, governments would be promoting their own subversion through sudden and widespread adult education. For it is clear that the education that enables adults to formulate their own dissent risks the loss of all constraints on freedom and imagination.
The double failure of seduction and education is based on a discrepancy between the new message and the style of life common to Latin America’s peasant majorities. For most, the idea that sexual technique can prevent conception is incredible; but even less credible to them is the idea that such techniques will produce personal affluence. Both claims seem to invoke magic. Further, the style by which this magical remedy is pushed has an odious smell. It evokes a rich establishment solicitous of teaching the poor how not to reproduce their like.
Even the approach to the individual is frequently brash, involving the tragic moment in a woman’s life when, as an alternative to the next abortion, she has become a receptive victim for initiation into the mystery of contraception. Claim, style, and method put the accent on protection against life rather than freedom for it. No wonder they fail.
To be attractive, family planning would have to be embraced as a way to express a deeper sense of life rather than be used as a mere protection against evil.
The appeal to magic, myth, and mystery must be dropped by both the proponents and the opponents of contraception. Obviously this is not easy. The vision of increasing world poverty overwhelms the imagination, and the creation of a myth is one way to escape unbearable anguish. The transformation of hungry persons into a mythical corporate enemy is as old as mankind, but so is the illusion that we can manage the myths we have made.
Once the “poor” have been reduced to a faceless river reaching the high-water mark on a statistical table, birth control campaigns can be credited with magical power and invoked to conjure away further flooding. Such programs give the impression that individuals should recognize themselves as drops in a swelling tide, so that each can do his best to reduce his kind. Not surprisingly, nobody does.
Only professors can delude themselves into the belief that men can be prodded to take for their personal motives in family planning the possibly valid policy reasons of the economist and the sociologist. One’s vital behavior is always beyond the reach of a decision made by others.
Populations are mindless: they can be managed but not motivated. Only persons can make up their minds; and the more they make up their minds, the less they can be controlled. People who freely decide to control their own fertility have new motivations or aspirations to political control. It is clear that responsible parenthood cannot be separated from the quest for power in politics. Programs that aim at such goals are unwelcome under the military governments prevailing in South America, and such programs are not the kind usually financed by the United States.
The development of Latin America as a Western colony requires massive schooling for children, to fit them passively into the acceptance of an ideology that keeps them “democratically” in place. Political order cannot tolerate too much awareness or originality or risk. The kind of education of adults that is analytical and dialectic leads inevitably to a liberation from taboos. Idols cannot be knocked off selectively; the kind of adult education that is aimed at dethroning some idols dethrones them all and is always politically subversive.
Kindred insights usually reinforce each other. The awareness that sex does not have to lead to unwanted motherhood provokes another concept: the insight that economic survival does not have to breed political exploitation. The freedom of the mate and of the citizen lead over the same road. Each taboo left behind means one obstacle less in the change from the social conditions that make all idols necessary.
All those who will give birth before 1984 are now in life. For each I ask: Will this child become a passive object, manipulated and sated by a technological milieu that encroaches on his feelings? Or will this child grow into a man who shares in the responsibility for a set of social trends? Will demographers trim his sex patterns to fit the planned population curve, just as industrial designers fit his job behavior to investment needs? Or will his move from the subsistence farm to a sprawling city increase his conscious control over his own life history?
In other words, will the city swallow his life? Or will he live with deeper freedom in the city? This is the question for 300 millions. Two-thirds of the 200-odd million inhabitants of America, below the Rio Grande, now are considered “rural.” Yet less than 35 per cent of the 350 millions expected in the next generation will make a living from agriculture. Most of those now alive—or those to be born during the next fifteen years—are existing in a world where mind, mores, and myth are rooted in a rural past. This means they come from a milieu in which personal success depends on the struggle for scarce resources, say, limited land, and where survival of one’s group had to be ensured by massive procreation against high mortality. Peasants value possession, tradition, and multiple fertility. This taste finds expression in their style of language, symbol, ideology, and religion.
Peasants’ culture provides categories that endow even extreme rural privation with dignity. The individual who moves to the city loses this powerful hereditary tool, and awareness and acceptance of this loss becomes a condition for survival. This requires a change in each man: a change both of behavior and of personal bearings.
This necessary change in behavior is the sum total of the change in the many strains of conduct that, like the strands of a rope, make up a human life. Each change in a man’s actions (on the job, in the street, or with his girl friend) is the fruit of his personal insight. Either it has freed him for the invention of a new habit, or it has resulted in his deadening submission to the new rhythm of the city.
Even more revolutionary than change behavior, however, are the new moorings the personality must find in the city. Urbanization for the individual means the search for new bearings in a world that assigns new coordinates to his most intimate feelings and drives. Character forces are given new labels and new slogans, and symbols are attached to them, to fit them into a new ideology.
The city, like any other engineered product, is sold to the newcomer with a set of instructions for its use. These instructions mystify the non-believer, the man who has not subscribed to the prevailing beliefs. This city creed has many dogmas. It prizes a medically protracted span of life, scholastic performance and certification, continued advancement and achievement on the job. Production and consumption become measuring sticks for most values, including fertility.
Change in behavior, change in bearings, and change in belief go hand in hand. Only the few capable of this triple change can elbow their way into the tiny islands of affluence.
Within this context, high consumption combined with high fertility is a luxury that few can afford. These few, quite often, are not the old bourgeois, but couples who by good luck rose quickly and established themselves. For most families the speed of social climb depends upon tight control of family size.
The lifelong discipline demanded by such control is hard on any adolescent raised in a hut, untrained as he is for silent deference to the humdrum of schooling, or the monotony of an office, or docility toward clock and schedule. A rare combination of character, circumstances, and peers is necessary to teach a peasant the set of disciplines by which he alone can ensure his climb to the upper reaches of city, business, or family life. The city is a much better selector than teacher.
The personality structure or character that makes for a child’s success in school ensures the passing of those who will also fit the corporate structure in the modern city. Those labeled by a certificate and outfitted with a car are presumably those most suited to take the needed precautions to lower their fertility and raise their insurance. The proven correlation of high schooling and low fertility is usually interpreted as a result of a schooling that renders pupils capable of using technical know-how, such as contraceptives. Actually the contrary is probable: schools select those already inclined toward such technical know-how. This is much more true in countries where grammar schools are selective and by that selection exclude more individuals than they accept.
Let me explain: the height of a social pyramid in Kansas and Caracas is about the same. What is different, north and south, is its shape. At best, three men out of one hundred in Caracas take the path corresponding to high school graduation, the family car, private health insurance and corresponding hygiene. I suggest that we distinguish between those who were lifted onto this level by birth and privilege and those who climbed there. These latter are much more carefully selected in Caracas than in Kansas. The steeper the pyramid, the more successfully it bars weakly motivated climbers who would barely even amble to the top of a slightly slanted incline. Those who scale the narrow and steep passage to success in Caracas must be sustained by more common drives and aims than those who are pushed up the broad flight of stairs of the United States college.
We are frequently reminded that family planning was adopted rapidly by certain ethnic groups, for example, Puerto Ricans in New York. Fertility of the entire group declined suddenly as the group moved to the city. This is true of those who made up their minds to go to New York and then “made it” there: those who moved out of Harlem, through school and into jobs that pay more than $7,000 annually. They are the ones who survived the police, drugs, discrimination, and welfare. Indeed, they rose faster than any ethnic group before them, and their fertility, too, fell faster.
Similar groups of leapfrog immigrants to affluence can be spotted all over Latin America. Their members tend to join the Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, the Christian Family movement, and other clubs that allow them to organize for further privilege for their kind. “The Association for the Protection of the Middle Classes” recently formed by Esso employees in Caracas is a good example of their tactics. But the fact that members of such groups do control their fertility is no proof that contraception is, even partially, a result of a more comfortable life. It means more probably that at present in Latin America only a few can be bewitched by the mirage of affluence.
It is revealing that fertility among the United States poor, particularly in the black ghetto, remains near Latin American levels. The common element is not some numerical indicator but a mood. In the United States ghetto, economic averages have been reached that are out of sight for our generation in Latin America. Per capita income, years of schooling, expenditure on health, printed pages read per person—all are beyond the healthy aspiration of 80 per cent of all Peruvians or Colombians, for example. But both here and there, political participation is low, power is limited, and the mood bleak. For the United States Negro the signs pointing to integration and affluence have led all too often to a dead-end street.
During the last two years, the United States public has begun, very rapidly, to sympathize with the Negro sentiment against birth control in the ghetto. It is more shocking that the same public considers the poor overseas less sensitive and more gullible than those at home. More free advice in Brazil is supposed to turn the same trick that failed in the United States ghetto. A rebuff at home is to be taken seriously. That same rebuff overseas can be written off as folly and hysteria.
Last year in Brazil the Roman Catholic bishops and the communists combined to arouse public indignation against supposed favors extended by the military government to missionaries who import U.S.-produced “serpents” into Amazonia. The serpentinas (coils) were to be “put into women” to render them sterile and to make Amazonia fit for colonization by Negroes imported from the United States, it was said.
The population expert bred around the North Atlantic easily interprets this as an outburst of sick imagination, rather than a symbolic protest against the United States serpent, soliciting tropical Eve to taste the apple of affluence. The economist, the planner, and the doctor tacitly assume that all men are compulsive consumers and achievers yearning for well-paid jobs and wishing themselves in the shoes of those who have made it with fewer babies and more things. Such reasoning is based on a presumed “law of human nature,” but that presumption is at least as spurious as that preached by the Catholics. Too often missionaries condescendingly see their own idiosyncrasies as other peoples’ natures.
Current American conversation in English about population unwittingly promotes an “imperialist” bias. I suggest that we awaken to this bias and handle it as an acceptable variable in policy making. But equally I suggest that we beware of joining in the controversy over sin, usually conducted in Latin, or in the conspiracy to outbreed the paleface, which sounds Chinese.
Only for a minority in Caracas or São Paulo could having a small family pay off immediately in higher living standards. For some 90 per cent, a meaningful improvement of such standards through birth control is beyond even their own temporal horizon. Most “constructive” reasons peddled to this majority for family control, therefore, are deceptive. They usually imply a subtle indoctrination of “middle class values.” Acceptance of these values should forestall revolution against them. He who has learned to see wealth as the key sign of success, and children the major obstacle to growing rich, might now blame his children for his poverty. Few do, of course, because the argument is outrageous and also untrue.
To obtain the unreasoned assent of the majority all kinds of programs are launched, most of them emphasizing immediate economic gain for the individual: direct rewards for each contraceptive treatment; oblique favors to small families; subtle, persuasive nudges connecting rising levels of expectation with low fertility. None works well enough. Why?
The fear of unattainable affluence does not intimidate the traditionally poor, just as the appeal to Hell has hardly influenced the sexual behavior of devout Catholics. In any case, it is cynical to expect them to forgo present enjoyment for the sake of a paradise that is open to others but is beyond, and will remain beyond, their reach. Nowhere do people breed according to White House policies or the Pope’s commands. Socioeconomic “reasons” and moral codes are equally ineffective in introducing contraceptives. The use of ideology to push or oppose family planning is always a call to idolatry and, therefore, anti-human.
Ideology can arouse in some persons regressive forces and lead them to the use of contraceptives. Ideology can justify the desire for money, resentment, envy, unwillingness to share, the fear of risk, or the desire to keep up with whatever Joneses. Ideology can explain these tendencies as contributions to political stability and productivity. But such reasoned sex control works only with a few, and they are strange and sick; their ideological motivations more frequently lead to irresponsible aggression than to discipline. Birth control is sold to the great majority under false pretenses; for them, it is a blind alley to enrichment and there it does not decrease fertility. The use of ideology to motivate individual behavior then is not only inhuman but it is also a fallacious policy. In such private matters, an appeal to patriotism, public spirit, or religion is usually a good excuse—but rarely a good reason.
For example, let me compare the documented failure of teachers to turn out readers to the failure of welfare agencies to teach contraception. Teachers try to convince Juanito that he should want to read in order to be able to know, and work, and vote. But Juanito wants none of this, and there is no reason why he should. Reading will hardly lead to college unless he gets help from an uncle who is already there. And his vote in Latin America today is certainly less meaningful than ten years ago when the Alliance for Progress began. The one argument that might convince Juanito to stay in school is the need for a certificate that is supposed to open the door to a job—many years later.
People learn complex skills best if this process of learning affords the learner an opportunity to give clear shape to feelings of images that already exist in his heart. Only he who discovers the help of written words in order to face his fears and make them fade, and the power of words to seize his feelings and give them form, will want to dig deeper into other people’s writing. The mere ability to decipher the written message will only lead indoctrinated masses to submit to instruction by schools and for factories, and at best enable them thereafter to use their leisure time to escape into cheap pulp-reading or make out the dubbed versions of foreign films.
Health workers tend to proceed very much like the teachers, except that they suggest that a pessary rather than a book will serve as the flying carpet into the better life. The product of the druggist, the stationer and the witch are used in the same style. Therefore, women who just swallow contraception are not better off than those who submit to print, or trust love potions or, superstitiously, Saint Anthony.
Schools succeed, at high cost, in producing literacy in a few children: only one out of four, in all of Latin America, go beyond the sixth grade. Welfare clinics have equally modest results in teaching adults contraception: only one out of four who seek advice ceases bearing children. Both agencies help to maintain the mold and the fold of the West. An economic comparison of school and clinic speaks for a shift of resources from literacy to birth control. On a short-term basis (let us say over fifteen years) the savings to a nation from one prevented life is much greater than the rise in productivity resulting from one schooled child.
Classroom and clinic both select better than they teach. If their combined budget were cut, it would probably not very significantly affect over-all fertility. But such a cut in favor of other programs cannot be taken into consideration unless it is understood to what degree the present school and health programs are politically necessary.
Latin American society is regarded as barren even by some of its utopian dreamers. Even educational reformers speak and act as if teachers on this continent are unable to bring forth something truly new in education. Whenever effective adult education programs are conceived and grow and threaten tradition, they are declared spurious and either aborted or ridiculed. Certainly large-scale programs are never financed, the excuse being that on such a scale the methods proposed for them have never been proven.
Military governments must fear Socrates: he must be jailed, exiled, ridiculed, or driven underground. Few great, popular, and respected Latin American teachers are employed in their own countries. If such men join the government, the Church, or an international agency, they will be threatened by corruption through compromise.
There is a profound difference in the character of those who participate in Latin American educational structures, and this difference makes it difficult for North Americans to understand the reasons fundamental education is both more important and more dangerous in South America than it is in the ghetto. In Latin America the political establishment consists of the less than 3 per cent of heads of family who have graduated from secondary school. For this minority, any massive involvement of the unschooled in political argument threatens a profound change. Therefore programs that might ultimately promote such involvement are either written off as self-defeating demagoguery, or quelled, quite understandably, as incitement to riot. Certainly they are not financed.
The prevailing uneven distribution of schooling is usually considered a major obstacle to the spread of technological know-how and to effective political participation. Huge increases of school budgets for children are recommended as the one way of spreading political power and technological know-how, including contraception. This policy, in my opinion, rests on three erroneous assumptions: an overestimation of the educational efficiency of schools; an unrealistic expectation that a geometric increase of resources for schooling could ever become feasible; and a lack of confidence in the educational value of politically oriented education.
Paulo Freire, the exiled Brazilian educator, has shown that about 15 per cent of the illiterate adult population of any village can be taught to read and write in six weeks, and at a cost comparable to a fraction of one school year for a child. An additional 15 per cent can learn the same but more slowly. For that purpose he asks his team to prepare in each village a list of words that have the greatest intensity of meaning. Usually these words relate to politics and are, therefore, a focus of controversy. His literacy sessions are organized around the analysis of the chosen words. The persons attracted by this literacy program are mostly those with political potential. We must assume that they are interested in dialogue and that learning to read and write its key words means for them a step to carry their political participation to new levels of intensity and effectiveness.
Obviously such education is selective. So are our present schools. The difference is that political potential makes the written page the place of encounter for the potentially subversive elements in society, rather than making it a sieve through which to pass those children who prove tolerant to compliance and qualified failure. Freire’s alumni consume a diet that is different from the pulp and trash on which dropouts feed.
I will never forget an evening with Freire’s pupils, hungry peasants in Sergipe, in early 1964. One man got up, struggled for words and finally put into one utterance the argument I want to make in this article: “I could not sleep last night … because last evening I wrote my name … and I understood that I am I … this means that we are responsible.”
Responsible citizenship and responsible parenthood go hand in hand. Both are the result of an experienced relatedness of the self to others. The discipline of spontaneous behavior is effective, creative, and sustained only if it is accepted with other people in mind. The decision to act as responsible mate and parent implies participation in political life and acceptance of the discipline this demands. Today in Brazil this means readiness for revolutionary struggle.
In this perspective, my suggestion to orient large-scale formal educational programs for adults intensively toward family planning implies a commitment in favor of a political education. The struggle for political liberation and popular participation in Latin America can be rooted in new depth and awareness if it will spring from the recognition that, even in the most intimate domains of life, modern man must accept technology as a condition. Conducted in this style, education to modem parenthood could become a powerful form of agitation to help an uprooted mass grow into “people.”