‘Sterilisation Must be Done Against Her Will’: Coloniality, Eugenics and Racism in Brazil 2018 — The Case of Janaína Quirino

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate how the discourse of reproductive rights, led by the Global North, is close to a eugenic bias based on population control, and exercises direct influence in countries of the Global South, such as Brazil. To this end, I demonstrate that entities such as Planned Parenthood International (IPPF), have considerable relevance in national and international spaces dedicated to debate on reproductive rights and thereby influence the production of eugenicist and colonial speeches about the countries of the Global South. Applying a Black feminist lens of reproductive justice to the Brazilian context, this article shows how discourses relating to the birth control of Black and poor Brazilian women were absorbed by Brazil when the country oversaw a mass sterilisation process under the influence of the United States between 1970 and 1990. I further demonstrate how such eugenicist policies still remain in force in the Brazilian State today, which in 2018 carried out, through its judiciary, a forced sterilisation surgery on Janaína Quirino, a poor Black Brazilian and woman. This analysis shows that the colonial discourse regarding the control of so-called disposable populations never left the country, being institutionalised even by the entities that should protect (and not violate) Brazilian women.