OPPOSITION TO FAMILY PLANNING IN LATIN AMERICA: CONSERVATIVE NATIONALISM.

The article focuses on the opposition to family planning among decision makers in Latin America. This opposition is primarily from three overlapping sources, namely, the Church, the Marxists and the Nationalists. The published work of three selected men are used to illustrate the nationalist way of thinking. The writers represent three important professions, namely, law, medicine, and journalism, three countries, namely, Peru, Colombia, and El Salvador, and three different but typical types of situations. In Peru, a nation just beginning to examine its population problem, reactions to its first population conference are dealt with. In Colombia, a nation which has both articulated a broad policy and introduced a pilot program, reactions to concrete national efforts to deal with the population problem are examined. In El Salvador, more diffuse reactions to what is viewed as a vast racist plot on the part of the white Western world are dealt with. The significance of the nationalist psyche has been much enhanced by the recent Papal encyclical, and what might have been dying embers may now he rekindled.