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Abortion in Puerto Rico Introduction The availability of a birth control pill in the 20th and 21st century has transformed the lives of countless women in the U.S, Western Europe, and many other countries. Women today in first world countries no longer need to worry about the risks of pregnancies that could interrupt their future career goals. These benefits are only available today because of the risks women from countries like Puerto Rico took when they were used for testing birth control.

Background During the 1950s, scientist and pharmaceuticals wanted to test newer methods of birth control. Although they wanted to test new methods of birth control, they knew there was no way of testing the serious side effects of the medication without evaluating those side effects on humans. Pharmaceuticals knew they would need to do human testing that would be risky and unethical because of the high dangerous risks that would be involved. A Company called Searle decided to test the pill in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico had been used to test birth control since 1930, and had become a testing ground that various pharmaceutical companies used to confirm the health liabilities involved with products. During the 1940s, Puerto Rican working women were used to test the safety of the Birth control pill and IUD. Many researchers believed it to be necessary to test on Puerto Rican women because they believed over population caused poverty in Puerto Rico. The researchers believed that unlike United States, who did not have an over population issue, Puerto Rican women would benefit from the positive side effects of birth control as it would decrease the population and that would outweigh the risks involved with testing on people. The researchers often blamed Puerto Rican women for the over population of the country. They assumed that women did not want to bother with various methods of birth control so they needed “easy “methods like a pill that could be supervised by a Dr. During these over population studies, women were blamed for being “backward”. These claims were false and did not coincide with reality in Puerto Rico, where the birth rate had decreased during the 1950s. It is important to note that “Many Politicians, doctors, and feminists within Latin America supported the use of birth control tests, mainly on working-class women, due to their own concerns about overpopulation and ideas about class and race.”

During Testing Researches used women from housing projects and hospitals in 1956 for testing. In a 1956 study of women from two sites (a Puerto Rican housing project and a hospital). Nearly half of the testing participants dropped out of the study because of side effects like severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, and mid-cycle bleeding. Many middle-class feminists worked side by side with pharmaceutical companies conducting the birth control tests. Often, these feminist were more concerned with side effects of the birth control and safety of the test subjects than the researchers.

Result These test not only risked the lives of countless Puerto Rican Women, but often they were conducted poorly. There were many disappointing results. When the seventy nine percent of the women who dropped out of the test were evaluated, it was revealed that often a rebound effect would occur where the women would have a greater chance of becoming pregnant after taking the pill and women became pregnant within four months after they stopped taking the pill. The stories of these women often go unspoken in many American and European feminist histories when talking about the benefits of contraception in the form of a pill. Sadly for many poverty stricken Latin American women, the pill did not provide the answer to their problems regarding birth control, and certainly did not help with population control in Puerto Rico.

Religious and Political Oppression Towards Women Telling Their Stories There is a stagnant form of religion and political oppression towards the women in Puerto Rico. For the most part, most of the Puerto Rican population practices a variation of Catholicism and Pentecostalism. With this in mind, “Both of these denominations are strongly opposed to abortion under any circumstances, and the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception other than periodic abstinence. This sets a conflict for a Puerto Rican woman between her own (and perhaps her family’s) needs and the demands of her church”.

With the arrival of Roe v. Wade in the United States in 1973, it brought about a substantial influential factor into the Puerto Rican society. Not only did it bring and influence, but a lot of controversy as well. This was a controversy that according to Jean P. Peterman, an expert in the issues of Puerto Rican women and abortion, “is fueled by the fact that abortion was legalized during a period of feminist activism and expanded opportunities for women.” With this new arrival of the feminist movement in Puerto Rico, came a new wave of actions that women started to enact.

Debates within Puerto Rican Society There are many attributes that contribute to the social issues that Puerto Rican women face. This is largely in part of the social stigma that pushed these women to cover their pregnancy or the fact that they were getting abortions. There is a belief that family comes first and that is a concern for the Puerto Rican women who become pregnant some in an illegitimate way. In that sense, “Virginity until marriage is extremely important and parents enforce strict behavioral rules for girls with this goal in mind.” For many of these women, it was imperative to make sure that these “unplanned pregnancies” are kept in secret in order to ensure the balance and order of the family home. On the other hand, patriarchal and male dominated homes in Puerto Rico are the core of family life going along with the societal norms and accepted culture of the region. Women during much of the century did not have much access to many forms of contraception and in turn were very limited to many of the available opportunities. On the other hand, because these women were constantly trying to hide their pregnancies from the public eye, specifically with their own families, it is suggesting that these homes where still run under a patriarchal system where honor and family respectability are important factors in everyday life. In turn, there is a highly gendered attribute to the average Puerto Rican family home.

This is where the idea that a woman’s reproductive system is part of the rest of society and where women’s rights are questioned. The idea that illegitimate children were being produced became an uneasiness within societal norms, which was swiftly changed. On the other hand women had a stronghold in being representative mothers by stating that “Nonetheless, traditional Puerto Rican culture values motherhood as the core of female identity. There is a generalized belief that ‘God will provide’. This brings about a very unique way in which women in Puerto Rico are viewed.

Forced Sterilization According to Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, explains that when the forced sterilization began in Puerto Rican working-class women as”…begin in the 1970s so as to understand how Puerto Rican working class women’s sterilization became crucial to the politics of liberation movements”. Between the 1970s and the 1980s the sterilization rate for women in their child-bearing years, were roughly one-third of the women in Puerto Rico, during this time, this was the highest rate throughout the world. Continuing with sterilization, Briggs continues on with genocide and social control, “The discourse of sterilization as genocide and social control had a long history on the island and tended to demarcate a position that could be quite conservative”.

Legality of Abortion in Puerto Rico Since 1973, abortion has been legal in Puerto Rico after the famous case of Roe vs. Wade. During the case, the Supreme Court of the United States “established that abortion is a fundamental right, under the United States Constitution”. Under most circumstances, abortion is legal in Puerto Rico. However, “procedures can only be performed by licensed physicians in authorized clinics”. Although abortions have been legal in Puerto Rico since 1973, most poor women go to government-authorized clinics for surgical abortions, while the wealthier women go to private practices that are covered by their medical insurance to have a combined procedure.

One study shows the official abortion counts in Puerto Rico from 2001 through 2006. The survey reported “The official count of abortions in Puerto Rico in 2006 translates to a rate of seven abortions per 1,000 women. The official rate was also low in 2003 (nine per 1,000). Both estimates fall far short of the survey-based estimate of 18 per 1,000 in 2001, 45 indicating severe underreporting in the official record. A more recent survey-based estimate is not available”. The study shows that the number of abortions have declined during the process of the five year research.

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