Catholic Church's Influence On Latin American Eugenics

Eugenics is known for its European presence. It, however, shaped the health care and legal practices of every region of the world, including Latin America. As Nancy Leys Stepan said of its reach in The Hour of Eugenics:
Hardly a single area in Latin America had in fact remained completely untouched by Eugenics by the 1930s.... [The movements] were led by medical doctors in obstetrics, child health, and mental hygiene, and their goals were to propagandize, and apply, the new science of Eugenics rather than to carry out research in heredity and health (Stepan 55).

Latin American Eugenics was unique. Rather than using sterilization and extermination to control its population, it combined Neo-Lamarckism, the idea that changes to one’s environment
Birth control, sterilization, and any other way to control a population, was antithetical to their philosophy. Especially in the predominately Catholic continent of Latin America, a decline in birth rate meant a decline in membership to the Church (“Eugenics”). In fear of this, Pope Pius XI promulgated Casti Connubii in 1930. It banned sterilization, mass-genocide of the unfit, and all methods of birth control: methods which the elites of Latin America encouraged. The encyclical was targeted towards Eugenic “extremists”, such as those in Germany, several other European countries, and the United States, who, because of fascism and increasing secularization, did not end their policies as a result (Kelves
Eugenics entered Mexico as puericulture. As early as 1903, La Gaceta Medica de Mexico, the official publication of Mexico’s National Academy of Medicine, published on puericulture. At the beginning of the 20th century, pronatalist reformers, as in the French movement that inspired it, sought to reduce infant mortality, boost population density, establish public clinics, and monitor the development of the population through gathering biomedical statistics. At first, Mexican Eugenics policies were labelled as “social hygiene services” dominated by the School Hygiene Service and Infant Hygiene Service. The First Congress of the Mexican Child, in 1921, consisted of delegates, doctors and nurses, and social engineers from these services (Stern). In Veracruz was the first piece of legislation aimed at the legalization of sterilization, created by Salvador Mendoza in conjunction with the Mexican Eugenics Society. It aimed to give justification for a new Section on Eugenics and Mental Hygiene, which would have focused on hereditary disease, criminality, prostitution, alcoholism, and mental disorders. It legalized the sterilization for “clear cases of idiocy”, the “degenerate mad”, the “incurably ill” and “delinquents.” The law passed marginally at the First Mexican Congress of the