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Jeannie Samuel, Raúl Necochea López. A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 72, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 374–377, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrw035
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Raúl Necochea brings readers through a hundred years of family planning in Peru. Moving away from a more standard focus on demographic transition theory, he draws on a range of other approaches, including political economy and gender theory, to knit together a complex story that shows the multiple paths that family planning has taken in the country over the past century. Necochea does an excellent job demonstrating that family planning was not merely the result of policies made or imposed by international actors, although international characters are certainly present in the story. Instead, as readers we are given a clear picture of an intricate web of local, national, and international actors, and events that propelled Peruvian family planning issues along in the twentieth century.
The first chapter of the book spans the late 1800s to the 1940s and draws linkages between family planning and the politics of nation-building. Here, national leaders were eager to promote population growth in order to encourage development. Peruvian officials envisioned population as a national economic resource. This translated into political efforts to encourage European immigration to strengthen as elites saw it the “racial qualities” of the national population. At the same time, academic medical experts in Peru were influenced by new eugenicist ideas that merged with older racist beliefs. When rural Andean migrants arrived in the country’s coastal cities, some medical professionals advocated eugenic birth control programs targeting these communities to soften the perceived blow that their presence was causing to the urban elite.
