XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Six million silenced voices: understanding the “consensual” sterilization of women in Brazil (1960s-1990s)

• In Event: Fight(s) for Citizenship Rights in Brazil: Race and Gender I

Abstract

For the original thinkers of largely disseminated eugenics, control over birth was essential to prevent nationality from degeneration. After 1945, with the public opinion’s discredit of eugenics and its association with Nazism, other topics of concern arose: the worldwide poverty and the population problem. This presentation focuses on the results of research about the “consensual” sterilization of almost six million women in Brazil in the context of the “humanitarian help” efforts after the 1950s.

We consider this process as being part of the legacy of eugenics – if not eugenics itself – transformed and implemented in the second half of the 20th century. Under arguments of women having low intelligence levels to make their own decisions about their bodies; policymakers and physicians making these decisions were predominantly men. On top of that, was the influence and impact of several international organizations giving funding, equipment, and medical education to practitioners.

Among some of the sources used are the Planned Parenthood records; Julian Huxley Papers (Rice University); memorandum “Some Implications of Population Trends in Poor Countries (CIA, 1970); Report NSSM 200 or Kissinger Report (1974); Brazilian Report Anticoncepção: 1986 [Contraception: 1986]; and the Relatório Final da Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito destinada a examiner a “incidência de esterilização em massa de mulheres no Brasil” (1993) [Report from National Commission to Investigate “the incidence of women’s mass sterilization in Brazil]; besides several bibliographical and biographical primary and secondary sources connecting the main representatives of these agreements and practices, the Brazilian researchers-gynecologists Elsimar Coutinho and Helio Aguinaga.

Author

• Pietra Diwan, Bluegrass Community & Technical College