The Religion of Life

Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile

Sarah Walsh

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780822988090
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The Religion of Life examines the interconnections and relationship between Catholicism and eugenics in early twentieth-century Chile. Specifically, it demonstrates that the popularity of eugenic science was not diminished by the influence of Catholicism there. In fact, both eugenics and Catholicism worked together to construct the concept of a unique Chilean race, la raza chilena. A major factor that facilitated this conceptual overlap was a generalized belief among historical actors that male and female gender roles were biologically determined and therefore essential to a functioning society. As the first English-language study of eugenics in Chile, The Religion of Life surveys a wide variety of different materials (periodicals, newspapers, medical theses, and monographs) produced by Catholic and secular intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century. What emerges from this examination is not only a more complex rendering of the relationship between religion and science but also the development of White supremacist logics in a Latin American context.

Chapter 1

“The Girl Is Not Pursued”

Shared Perspectives and Threats to the Chilean Race

On December 15, 1901, La Revista Católica (LRC; The Catholic review) published an article entitled “Guerra al Alcoholismo” (War on alcoholism). The article was part of the magazine’s “Variedades” (Variety) section, which featured brief articles on issues of special interest to the periodical’s primarily Catholic readership both lay and clerical. The article began: “Alcoholism is a social plague: it destroys health, relaxes morality; [it] peoples hospitals, asylums and jails, and it wounds and punishes its victims up to and including their offspring. It is not strange, then, that moralists have united with physicians and economists to wage all-out war against [it].”¹ Going on to discuss how this war would be won primarily through moral uplift programs and temperance, the anonymous author expressed sentiments that matched those of temperance advocates all over the world at the turn of the twentieth century.² Despite the relatively unremarkable laments over alcoholism, however, this article highlights one of the more notable aspects of the eugenic movement in Latin America. Depicting moralists, physicians, and economists as equally vital in the fight for Chilean public health, the author illustrates a phenomenon that permeated debates in Latin American eugenics and racial thought for at least the next four decades. Specifically, the author’s language demonstrated just how pervasive eugenic concepts had become in Catholic periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century and also the relatively small size and dynamism of the Chilean scientific community.

Reflecting upon the extent of this interaction between Catholicism and eugenics, some of the most important concerns discussed in Chilean eugenic literature, Catholic and secular, were regarding the future of the national racial body. In particular, the Chilean family was often characterized as the first line of defense against racial degeneration. Placing such an onus on the family not only reinforced the importance of traditional gender roles for both men and women but also forged intellectual bridges between secular and Catholic perspectives on eugenics as conceptualized and practiced in Chile and Latin America more generally. In other words, regardless of religious persuasion, belief in eugenic policies and theories tended to demand a belief in patriarchal family structures and traditional gender roles that Catholic institutions and representatives had been advocating for centuries. Eugenic writing that appeared in Catholic periodicals eagerly pointed out this similarity and sought to capitalize upon it, while secular articles often portrayed religious belief as antiquated, at best, and at worst, dangerous to the future of the Chilean race.

Gender as a Shared Site of Concern

A primary conceptual space in which Catholic and eugenic interests merged was in the reification of the patriarchal family structure and the roles women and men played within it. Eugenic writers regularly covered a variety of gender-based issues that threatened the racial health of Chileans. One of the more troubling concerns they raised was the supposed infertility of the most eugenically fit members of the race.³ The physician Christian Van Lennep, a member of the Sociedad Médica de Valparaíso (Valparaíso Medical Society), discussed this in his September 1917 article entitled “Esterilidad del Matrimonio” (Matrimonial infertility). Appearing in the Revista Médica de Chile (RMC; The Chilean medical review), this article was written for physicians who in their practice might encounter couples with fertility problems. In continuous print since 1872, the RMC served as one of the primary journals for Chilean physicians and medical professionals. Like a significant number of the prominent physicians working in the country in the early twentieth century, Van Lennep was not Chilean by birth. In fact, he was born in the Netherlands in 1886. He studied medicine and upon his graduation from medical school in 1907 was given a place in the prestigious Boherhaave Clinic in Amsterdam. However, he was obliged to emigrate when it came to light that he was having an affair with his supervisor’s wife. He chose Chile in 1911 after seeing an advertisement in The Lancet calling for specialists to move to the country. Once in Valparaíso, Van Lennep worked as an obstetrician, and it was in this capacity that he wrote his article for the RMC.⁴

In “Esterilidad del matrimonio,” Van Lennep argued that most physicians typically blamed women for fertility problems although, medically speaking, men were just as likely to be the cause.⁵ He also implied that this was not necessarily the result of natural conditions. Rather, he contended that a common cause of female infertility, problems affecting the fallopian tubes, were “generally acquired by infections caused by the husband.”⁶ More often than not, Van Lennep believed, husbands carried sexually transmitted infections that affected their wives’ reproductive systems without suffering any physical consequences themselves. This was doubly repugnant, in his opinion, because men often contracted these infections by engaging in sexual relationships with women other than their wives. The implication was that most men regularly engaged the services of prostitutes, who at the time were understood as known vectors of venereal disease.⁷ In this context of presumed marital infidelity, Van Lennep thought that physicians should not permit men to blame their wives if they were having difficulty conceiving.

Nor should doctors be inclined to see the problem as primarily one of female physical dysfunction. As physicians, he wrote, “it is important to communicate to [the husband], the wife being many times treated poorly [and] being accused of being useless, that the first cause [of infertility] is in him, even though his sperm may appear normal.”⁸ He implied that it was a poorly trained physician who looked only at female patients as the cause of matrimonial infertility. This approach certainly shows that Van Lennep had empathy for his female patients, but it should also be understood as reaffirming the eugenic notion that maintaining a strict gender binary was essential to racial health. While holding men accountable for their sexual indiscretions, he still placed a premium on supposedly normal female sexuality as being almost exclusively reproductive. Female prostitutes were inherently sexually aberrant, so they did not figure into this argument. This would prove to be the overwhelming consensus in Chilean eugenic texts of the period regarding infertility.

Federico Ankelen Haussen, an obstetrician, also wrote about Chilean physicians’ apparent enthusiasm for holding women solely responsible for fertility problems within married couples. His article on the subject, “Esterilidad femenina” (Female infertility), appeared in the January 1934 issue of Medicina Moderna (Modern medicine), another periodical aimed at physicians, which was published between 1927 and 1943. Then working at the Hospital San Agustín in Valparaíso, Ankelen would go on to head the Escuela Universitaria de Obstetricia y Puericultura (University School of Obstetrics and Puericulture) of the Universidad de Valparaíso in 1961.⁹ Suggesting that the supposed crisis of fertility in Chile was, at least partially, perpetuated by sexism, he wrote: “The sexual pride characteristic of the man means that the woman is almost always blamed for infertility. In reality it is demonstrated that in half of these cases the man is responsible.” Ankelen’s statement demonstrates that male sexuality was associated more with sexual bravado and less with an actual desire to have children, unlike that of women. He insisted that this pride in male sexuality was not restricted to male patients alone. It also affected Chilean physicians (by and large a majority male population) in their ability to do their jobs effectively. The notion that women were mostly responsible for infertility problems was so deeply entrenched among Chilean physicians that Ankelen felt compelled to write, in bold text: “No woman should be considered infertile while a microscopic examination of the husband’s semen [for defects] goes undone and live sperm have been found.”¹⁰

Infertility among those perceived to be Chile’s most racially fit was also linked to another concern raised in eugenic texts—about the use and availability of birth control. One of the earliest mentions of birth control and the supposed threat it posed to the Chilean race was in Pierre Barbet’s 1924 monograph, Preparación del joven al matrimonio (Preparation of the young man for marriage). Barbet was a French physician and the chief surgeon at Saint Joseph Hospital in Paris.¹¹ Even further illustrating the already strong linkage between eugenics and Catholicism within the Latin scientific community, he became best known for his book La passion de N.-S. Jésus-Christ selon le chirurgien (Doctor at Calvary: The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ as Described by a Surgeon), published in 1950, which contended that the Shroud of Turin was authentic.¹² Still many years away from this success though, it is unclear why the Liga Chilena de Higiene Social (Chilean Social Hygiene League) decided to translate and publish Preparación.

Barbet argued that birth control for married couples allowed them to enjoy the physical pleasures of sex without the responsibility of bearing children, which presented a significant threat to the Chilean race by encouraging an indulgent and immoral attitude. “If the [betrothed] only look to marriage for the satisfaction of their sensual appetites, they will fall into the very sad practice of neo-Malthusianism and anti-conceptive precautions.”¹³ He also contended that this casual attitude toward sex would result in the increased use of prostitutes among men.¹⁴ This behavior would further threaten the integrity of the Chilean race, as writers such as Van Lennep seemed to substantiate when discussing sexually transmitted diseases affecting women’s reproductive systems. Barbet’s Catholic background, medical training, and experience led him to advocate for sexual continence for all people. Yet his book was directed at men only, intimating that he believed they had more difficulty with this than women.

Marital infertility was also perceived to be the result of the increasing availability of birth control and Chilean eugenic texts made a variety of arguments against its use. One of the more intriguing approaches focused on the fact that birth control was the result of a misunderstanding and a misreading of contemporary societal problems. Alejandro Huneeus Cox wrote an entire article dedicated to his belief that social scientists had misinterpreted English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus’s work related to population and food production. This article is significant not only because of its content but also because of its inclusion in the August 1933 issue of Estudios (Studies). The magazine was published by the Centro de Estudios Religiosos de Santiago (Center of Religious Studies of Santiago)—founded in 1928 by Partido Conservador (Conservative Party) member Ricardo Cox Méndez—and was designed to publicize the work of those affiliated with the center.¹⁵ Aiming at a fairly academic readership, Estudios went through a run of 255 issues spanning twenty-five years from 1932 to 1957. Jaime Eyzaguirre, conservative lawyer and historian, was cofounder and served as editor of the periodical for its lifetime.¹⁶ Due to the power and influence of both Cox and Eyzaguirre, Estudios represented an important site of Catholic intellectual development and knowledge production in mid-twentieth-century Chile. Notably, articles about eugenics, health, and science made regular appearances throughout the magazine’s run.

On the very first page of the August 1933 article, Huneeus argued: “Modern ideas about the maximum density of the population absolutely differ from the Malthusian theory. For Malthus the problem only consisted of the relationship between the increase in population and that of subsistence; today it is a matter of population density and the productivity of human industry.”¹⁷ In other words, Huneeus insisted that modern scholars had applied Malthus’s original theory incorrectly by glossing over the difference between population growth and density as well as availability of food and industrial productivity. These latter concepts were not what Malthus had discussed, so his ideas regarding scarcity or population management were not relevant to more modern-day discussions that went beyond his original intent and scope.

Huneeus ultimately argued that advocates for birth control were mistaken. Rather than attempting to limit the population, which he insisted nature could regulate on its own, experts should be working to develop new types of technologies to facilitate the growth and distribution of food for the world’s population. He blamed irresponsible capitalist economic expansion for the supposed need for birth control. The difficulties in which many working people found themselves were not, according to Huneeus, because they had too many children but, rather, because capitalist economic logics punished the lower classes.¹⁸ In fact, those logics were pushed to their extreme limit in the debates regarding birth control. He wrote: “Now then, the advocates of Birth-Control, far from ensuring the worker the benefits of a just salary to which he has the rights, they want to deprive him of that other unalienable right of all human beings, which is to start a family.”¹⁹ Arguments like these should be read not only in terms of the explicit critique of class differences operating in early-twentieth-century Chile but also as a more subtle racial and ethnic critique as well. The working and lower classes were often implicitly understood to be racially less fit because of their environmental circumstances as well as their supposedly undesirable physical characteristics such as dark hair and skin.

One of the more intriguing discussions of birth control methods as self-imposed infertility appeared in the January 1934 issue of Medicina Moderna. In an article entitled “Esterilidad fisiológica” (Physiological infertility), the Argentine physician and psychiatrist Arturo Guitarte adamantly opposed the use of the rhythm method, arguing that it had no basis in medical fact and that doctors should not recommend it to their patients. He seemed especially committed to the idea that female patients not be counseled to avoid pregnancy in this way, even when becoming pregnant presented significant health risks. For Guitarte, encouraging women to avoid pregnancy was akin to recommending a therapeutic abortion, which, he hastened to say, the Catholic Church frowned upon.²⁰ Of the rhythm method, or other practices involving periods of avoiding sexual contact, he wrote: “The Church sees the justification of marriage and its subsequent cohabitation in procreation; such that it prohibits all artificial methods that might diminish it. Starting from this strictly religious point of view, temporary chastity would not have the value of true chastity, but rather would be considered a subterfuge to avoid conception, and, even though some confessors have advised this with negative results, this method would not differentiate itself from other forms of birth control.”²¹ It seems that Guitarte was led to this rather extreme position because he believed, based on his research, that only 10–15 percent of sexual encounters resulted in pregnancy.²² Since the numbers were so low to begin with, from his perspective the idea that fit individuals might attempt to limit their fertility even further was unconscionable.

The rhythm method was a particular focus in the debates surrounding birth control in Chile during this period. In a 1936 issue of the Boletín Médico Social (BMS; Social medicine bulletin), an author identified only as “E. M. S.” wrote a review of the book Grave problema conyugal: El número de los hijos (The serious conjugal problem: The number of children) by Armand Dorsaz, André Rendu, and Raoul de Guchteneere. The BMS was published by the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (Social Security Fund) for two decades, from 1936 to 1956, and its overall mission was dedicated to improving the general welfare of the Chilean populace through public health education. Originally published the year before in France under the title Le contrôle rationnel des naissances, the book championed the use of the rhythm method as the best way to avoid pregnancy.²³ Despite stipulating that married couples were not obligated to have children, E. M. S. did not share the same enthusiasm for the project as its authors, indicating that Latin eugenics was not a uniform intellectual landscape.²⁴ E. M. S. wrote: “given the conditions of contemporary social organization and the existing sexual freedom, under the false protection that DORSAZ’s book gives, would give rise to a resurgence in free sexual unions, legal and extralegal, and with that, a good number of those condemned and abominable abortions that would be directly attributed to the inopportune...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “The Girl Is Not Pursued”: Shared Perspectives and Threats to the Chilean Race
• Chapter 2. The Two Truths: “Harmonizing” Catholicism and Science
• Chapter 3. What Is Eugenics in Chile? Formulating a National Discipline from a Transnational Movement
• Chapter 4. “One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World”: Raza chilena and the Construction of Chilean Racial Homogeneity
• Chapter 5. “Intimately Linked to the Issue of Sex”: Racial Health and the Modernization of Patriarchy
• Chapter 6. Picturing la raza chilena: Visual Imagery and the Creation of a Racial Type
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index