HUMAN REPRODUCTION POLICIES IN BRAZIL: A RACIAL AND GENDER PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Introduction: Human reproduction policies have been used as a technology to control women's bodies throughout modernity. In the capitalist system, the discourse of birth control was recovered to the extent that the black population stood out numerically. At the same time, the concept of progress flooded the pharmaceutical and medical industry, creating a really lucrative market for women from the middle and upper classes. Objective: The objective of this work is to map the contribution of the black women's movement in Brazil, in the sense of problematizing birth control as a reproductive policy, considering the historical configurations in which race, gender and class are cleavages that define living conditions, for individual decision-making, as well as guiding public policies in a country with a colonial heritage. Method: To do so, we used the literature review methodology on human reproduction and the black women's movement, intersecting how these two markers interconnect for political struggle. Results: The results indicate that poor and black women were offered definitive sterilization as a means of avoiding the birth of new black children. For white women from the middle and upper classes, the discourse that involved the control of reproduction was linked to the technologies of well-being, autonomy and availability for material success. This duality corroborates the eugenic premise still present in the Brazilian State, whose control of reproduction has always been linked to the profit of capital, as well as in the incessant search for the whitening of populations in the Americas.