Population Control in Puerto Rico

La Operación

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. imposed a mass-sterilization policy in Puerto Rico, sterilizing over 33% of women on the island.

An Afro-Puerto Rican woman discusses the sterilization of herself and her siblings, as well as her daughters a few decades later. She laments their inability to continue having kids (Film: La Operación). 

As Briggs discusses, the sterilization surgery, referred to as “La Operación,” built on previous discussions of addressing the problem of overpopulation through birth control and sterilization.

Overpopulation

This concept of overpopulation, as Briggs describes, stems directly from the ongoing eugenics movement in the continental United States. Specifically, North-American nationalism sought “protection for the (white, U.S.) nation from too many of ‘them’ – working-class and dark-skinned people” (Briggs 75). This exclusive nationalism was derived from hard eugenics, which suggested the sterilization of ‘inferior’ people who were mentally unfit, or, as Briggs puts it, ‘non-Nordics.’

This racist nationalism combined with another, modernizing nationalism that promoted small families as the “key to the well-being of the island.” Both Puerto Rican and North American reformers suggested that alongside family sizes, reducing irregular marriages and maternal/infant mortality rates was vital to improving the country’s economic status and clout in Latin America (Briggs 75). Nevertheless, proponents of this nationalism indirectly contributed to the racism that played a factor in the mass sterilization of Puerto Ricans.

“There will be, of course, American soldiers and machine guns to reduce the population. Perhaps this is the best method of solving the problem, but if the time for machine guns should ever come, where will the major responsibility lie? Sooner or later, the force of the military will be required to put down Puerto Ricans’ unruly reproduction.” – Theodore Schroeder

Theodore Schroeder, c. 1951.

Overpopulationists used discriminatory phrases such as ‘unruly’ to describe Puerto Rican family culture, and reformers directly targeted Puerto Ricans’ values as a whole. Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement, retorted:

“When our women lose the transcendental and divine concept that they are not only mothers of their children but mothers of all future generations of Puerto Rico,..Puerto Rico will disappear within a generation.” – Pedro Albizu

Although these views may be selectively operating where female gender roles are restricted to that of a mother, Albizu’s point demonstrates reformers’ lack of understanding for contemporary Puerto Rican culture. More importantly, as Briggs underlines, the argument that Puerto Ricans’ excessive ‘sexuality’ and ‘fertility’ was the cause for poverty was completely faulty.

“In the 1940s, as population grew, per capita income grew much faster, doubling between 1940 and 1944, and tripling by 1952. Population, in other words, failed utterly as an explanation of the cause of insular poverty, it did not even correlate with it.” – Laura Briggs

Eugenics

Nevertheless, overpopulationists continued their argument and, as Briggs discusses, the scarcity of resources supported their argument. Unfortunately, they failed to realize that “Operation Boostrap,” the U.S.’s attempt at bringing industrialization and company manufacturing to Puerto Rico, only resulted in a displaced populace trapped in poverty and reliant on corporations.

“Operation Boostrap” and the growth of a class of impoverished, working class Puerto Ricans. Supporters of the Eugenics movement in the continental U.S. utilized a similar argument against this ‘excess population of Puerto Ricans,’ and approved sterilization for the island  (Film: La Operación). 

The eugenics movement employed arguments against the ‘dark-skinned’ Puerto Ricans and justified sterilization due to their racial inferiority, as described in La Operación’s discussion on eugenics. Briggs highlights that the American “legislature passed a eugenic sterilization law which included poverty as a legitimate reason for permitting sterilizations.” As researchers at the Rockefeller Foundation in birth control research admit, they viewed poor, colonized families as “dull-witted” and dangerous (Briggs 108). Ultimately, the racist view with which the U.S. approached Puerto Rican reproduction lead to their decision to implement forced sterilization on the island.

With this justification in hand, birth control and contraceptive companies developing pills came to Puerto Rico for trials. At a 1955 Tokyo Conference on Birth Control, Solly Zuckerman described:

“We need better evidence about the occurrence of side effects in human beings. It is not enough though…that we take presumed negative evidence about the lack of side-effects from animal experiments to imply that no undesirable side-effects would occur in human beings.” – Solly Zuckerman

The development of birth control to address the arguments of overpopulationists (film: La Operación).

Ultimately, race and eugenics played an extreme role in developing the argument of overpopulation, which eventually lead the U.S. to pass legislation approving sterilization without informed consent and experimentation on Puerto Rican, working class women.