Modern Mothers for Third World Nations: Population Control, Western Medical Imperialism, and Cold War Politics in Haiti

摘要

This article examines American Unitarian Universalist missionaries who were avowed 'anti-imperialists'. They opposed United States military and economic hegemony and hoped to resolve Third World' dependency. Nevertheless, they became cultural imperialists when they empowered a Haitian physician named Ary Bordes to promote Western medicine and contraception in a peasant community in Haiti in the 1960s. The article shows how the population control movement transcended a very wide spectrum in American Cold War politics. Both extremes, Cold Warriors and their religiously-motivated detractors, had rival roles to play in the creation of a 'medical empire' that linked health care and reproduction in Haiti to medical culture in the United States. American missionaries employed medicine, contraception, and instruction to try to turn Haiti's peasant women into 'modern' mothers who would advance their nation and show the Third World' a new path to prosperity.