Un Impero che seduce e che si riproduce. Politiche di controllo della natalità a Puerto Rico (1898-1960)

Since the 1898 war, Puerto Rico has represented a peculiar territory in terms of inter-American relations and has often been considered a sort of experimental laboratory of the United States imperial policies, later reproduced abroad. Building on Laura Briggs’ book Reproducing Empire. Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2012), the article focuses on the birth control policies implemented by the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the trials on the first oral contraceptives, carried out on the island at the beginning of the 1950s and extended to the United States in 1960 after the authorization of the Food and Drug Administration. These policies have been quickly tagged by the most active nationalists and some feminist groups as ‘“genocidal.” Several different primary sources, though, highlight a plurality of social subjects and very different reactions to those policies, ranging from sharp rejection to eager acceptance, for instance by health professionals in search of modernization and of solutions to a chronic problem in the island, poverty, partly due to overpopulation. Analyzing this set of issues leads us to a sort of intersection between “hard” and “soft” power, either unilateral and imposed or negotiated and even attractive, according to the different social subjects involved.