Beyond Hospital Walls – Practicing Family Planning and Medicine in Cold War Guatemala

• In Event: Cincuenta Años de Debates en Población, Salud Sexual y Reproductiva, part 1

Abstract

When family planning activities started in so called less developed countries during the 1960s, the "Third World" doctor was considered a natural ally for providing information on and access to 'modern' contraceptives. Simultaneously transnationally acting population experts who had been addressing worldwide population growth and its supposedly negative effects on development and modernization since the 1940s, began to advocate the establishment of family planning programs within public health sectors.

In Guatemala a family planning program was established within the structures of the Ministry of Health in 1967. In the eyes of population experts this program which was financed to a great extent by the US Agency for International Development, did not show any success. As a result, these experts blamed Guatemalan doctors for the "failure" of the family planning project in this country because, according to these experts, Guatemalan physicians were either too conservative or too 'leftist' to support the spread of "modern" contraceptive practices. While regarding local physicians a "stumbling stone" for the spread of family planning, transnational actors increasingly turned to non-medical actors and initiated health programs – designed to train new health personnel – in order to bring birth control to rural and indigenous population. These initiatives accompanied, if not encompassed ideas of grass root- and community-medicine, and often competed with other local health approaches.

Concentrating on the 1970s, the paper will track these new initiatives designed to de-professionalize medical practices, their global embeddedness and connections to discussions on "overpopulation" in Guatemala. It will further illustrate how the gradual integration of these ideas opened new medical spaces beyond the "classical" hospital in Guatemala, and how these new approaches were contested in Cold War Guatemala.

Author

• Annika Hartmann, Justus Liebig University Gießen/Universitaet Bremen