UC San Diego

Latin Americans practice reproductive management at rates comparable with Western Europe and North America, a counterintuitive finding given the region's staunchly Catholic past. This paper examines the discourses on Christianity and modernity which, together, shape much of Latin Americans' views on the issue of reproductive management. I propose that Latin Americans are prone to viewing hormonal birth control, permitted by evangelicals but not the Catholic Church, as modern, while abortion is not viewed in terms of modernity. I argue that thought about issues on which Catholicism and evangelicalism diverge is often structured by Latin Americans as the homology Catholic:evangelical:: traditional:modern, and that this homology shapes reproductive management more broadly by affecting ideas about agency, piety, gender, sexuality, and the family. I argue that, where Protestant and Catholic doctrine converge, such as in the case of reproductive management through induced abortion, Christian notions of modernity or tradition do not apply; other cultural relationships must be theorized. Finally, I explore the idea that religion, for contemporary individuals in general and for Latin American Christians in particular, better conceptualized as a generator of images, themes and stories than of doctrine