Reproductive Justice and Eugenics in the Anthropocene
US imperialist policies in the archipelago of Puerto Rico show us clearly how all politics is indeed reproductive politics. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Puerto Rico was categorized by US imperialists as pathological, not quite human, or in need of fixing. Imperial understandings of science and technology were operationalized throughout the twentieth century to manage and control those considered “inferior,” as well as their space and environment. Making use of eugenics as a “racializing assemblage” (Weheliye 2014), eugenicists pathologized Puerto Rican sexuality and reproductive practices in particular (Briggs 2002).
Through the case of Puerto Rico, I will highlight how coloniality operates to manage and control not only individuals, but also their environment, which ultimately contributes to risk politics (Rose 2007) and slow death (Puar 2017). According to Berlant (2007, 753), slow death “refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.” Puar (2017, 1) expands this concept to encompass how neoliberalism and the logics of capitalism create slow death as the “debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering.” In the case of Puerto Rico, the logics of colonialism and militarism imposed by the United States empire manifest as a “slow wearing down of the population” (Puar 2017, xiv) through the lack of sovereignty, the active destruction of the environment, and the regulation of reproduction, among other forces. Following Farmer (2004), I argue that Puerto Rico’s context in relation to climate change, social inequalities, racialization, colonialism, and reproductive control needs to be analyzed through the lens of structural violence. Puerto Rico’s complicated histories with the logics of empire and coloniality exemplify how “violence is exerted systematically,” which should ultimately be analyzed as “complex biosocial phenomena” (Farmer 2004, 307–08).
Applying a reproductive justice approach (Luna and Luker 2013; Silliman et al. 2004) and decolonial theories (Espinosa Miñoso et al. 2022; Lugones 2010), I address the continued complex politics and policies of colonial contexts such as Puerto Rico. Reproductive justice allows us to analyze critically the ways in which population geography has historically had “problematic linkages to global population politics and the (mis)use of demographic knowledge production for racist and eugenic politics and settler colonialism” (Schurr et al. 2025, 400). Thus, I argue that the case of Puerto Rico allows us to see why both eugenics and colonialism must be incorporated into the analysis of the Anthropocene and the longer histories of the use and misuse of population studies. Dow and Chaparro-Buitrago (2023, 266) argue that scholars should consider the “intersections between environmental and reproductive concerns and activism, through the framework of environmental reproductive justice (ERJ).” They argue that the concept of the Anthropocene is built on a myriad of assumptions in relation to the universalizing features of temporality and the category of “the human” (Weheliye 2014; Wynter 2003), among others. Sasser (2018, 3) highlights how the return of population control in environmental debates redeploys neo-Malthusianism, now repackaged as a “rights-based solution, including voluntary access to contraception, access to education, and income-generating opportunities for women and girls worldwide.” This, Sasser argues, has unequal effects in the control and management of reproduction in the Global South. In this sense, foregrounding a more holistic understanding of the Anthropocene takes into account longer histories of coloniality, the structural dynamics of slow death, and reproductive (in)justices that are pivotal to understanding and addressing climate change. Analysis of the archipelago of Puerto Rico reveals the problematic ways in which we think about population in the Anthropocene and enduring links with a long history of colonialism, reproductive coercion and control, environmental extractivism, and militarism.
Puerto Ricans have consistently fought against the exacerbation of social, health, and environmental inequalities produced by colonialism in the Anthropocene. Yet histories of coloniality, violations of reproductive autonomy, and environmental racism have created economies, politics, and structures in which Puerto Ricans cannot realize their right to raise their children in safe and healthy environments. The latter is a key tenet of reproductive justice. Coined by Black feminists in 1994, reproductive justice was envisioned as a way to highlight the structural conditions that extend beyond reproductive rights. Broadly, there were three main tenets that encompassed the goals of reproductive justice: (1) the right to have children, (2) the right to not have children, and (3) the right to raise children in safe and healthy environments (Ross and Solinger 2017). Reproductive justice activists and scholars have since added a fourth tenet, which includes the right to bodily autonomy and pleasure. Synergizing decolonial theories with Black feminist understandings of reproductive justice provides a more complete understanding of the legacies and continuations of eugenics in the ways in which we understand coloniality, the Anthropocene, and reproduction.
The eugenics movement strengthened after Francis Galton coined the term in 1883. While there are different epistemological approaches to discuss both its continuations and ruptures, I am guided by Bashford’s (2012) question: “Where did eugenics go?” This question allows critical eugenic scholars to observe an enduring eugenics well after the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. Ultimately, the popularization of eugenics was due to its malleability while being considered a “mainstream” and “legitimate” science. Conroy (2017, 16) describes the eugenic movement as a secular religion, producing an epistemological framework that pursued a “utopian chimera of a ‘scientifically’ perfect society.” However, this does not mean that these movements were homogeneous; on the contrary, they often perceived and addressed needs and problems in their own particular contexts.
Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States since 1898 and of Spain before then, was no stranger to eugenic ideas and policies. Eugenics operated as a “convenient rationale” for the management and control of the colony regarding its inhabitants’ “pathological” reproductive practices (Sánchez-Rivera 2022 and 2024). This created the conditions for systematic sterilization processes across the archipelago as well as experimentation with contraceptives without women’s consent from the late 1940s onward. As Paul B. Preciado (2013, 148) has noted, “the pseudocolonial island of Puerto Rico became the most important clinical site for testing the pill outside the national disciplinary institutions of the asylum and the prison and functioned as a parallel, life-size biopolitical pharmacological laboratory and factory during the late 1950s and early 1960s.” I argue that while the global condemnation of eugenics by a postwar generation discouraged the use of direct eugenic terminology, Puerto Rico has nonetheless continued to be used by the imperial core as a colonial eugenic laboratory throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, was consistently employed by the United States for military exercises from 1947 until the Marines’ departure in May 2003. The US Navy occupied about two-thirds of the island for six decades, and the military tested live ammunition there (Sanderson et al. 2017, 40). Sanderson et al. (2017, 40) note that the “first large scale war games took place in 1948 involving more than 60 war ships, 350 planes, and 50,000 troops from all branches of the military.” Moreover, “in the early 1980s, an average of 3400 bombs were deployed, 158 days of naval bombardment, 200 days of air-to-ground combat exercises and 24 days of marines practicing invasions per year on the island…. From 1983–1998, the military deployed more than 17.7 million kg of munitions in Vieques.”
After many decades of local social movements fighting against the occupation and military testing in Vieques, the military retreated on May 1, 2003. However, contemporaneously, there are about 9,000 local inhabitants in Vieques still suffering the adverse health effects, especially in regard to cancer risks. Scholars have shown how such massive military intervention has had environmental as well as social and health effects (Rivera-Collazo 2015). In 2005, for instance, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) argued that the exposure to ecological and health risks is not under control on this island. The EPA assessment argues that “(1) contamination has been detected at a site at an unsafe level; and (2) a reasonable expectation exists that people may be exposed to the contaminants” (Sanderson et al. 2017, 40). A study published by Puerto Rico’s Health Department (2003) stated that residents of the island of Vieques were “27% more likely than other Puerto Ricans to have some form of cancer” (Umpierre 2021, 1).
Historically, cancer care has only ever been available in mainland Puerto Rico. The situation of cancer patients in Vieques has become increasingly complex after the closure of their only available hospital following Hurricane Maria in 2017. On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria effectively destroyed the archipelago of Puerto Rico, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths, making it one of the worst environmental disasters to strike the island in recent history (Mercy Corps 2020). The mismanagement of Hurricane Maria by the then president, Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Republican government of the time created the conditions for Puerto Rico to have very little control over disaster management. For instance, during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, one of the largest blackouts in history was recorded, and the largest in the United States (Houser and Masters 2018). In this sense, the passing of Hurricane Maria over the archipelago and its aftermath should be catalogued as an (un)natural disaster—not because of the hurricane itself, but due to the mismanagement and the exacerbation of social and health inequalities produced by colonialism. For instance, due to colonial legacies on the island, and especially Operation Bootstrap (1944) implemented by the US Federal Government and then carried out by governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico stopped producing crops and mostly relied on imported produce. This created the conditions for Puerto Rico to become a “food desert,” leading to food scarcity and insecurity (Lerman Ginzburg 2022). This is why Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones (2019, 11) highlights the importance of “probing analyses of the consequences of disasters and political disempowerment in Puerto Rico.” In this sense, the logics of coloniality, eugenics as an imperial tool and rationale, and a focus on justice are imperative to understand the complexity of Puerto Rican histories in the Anthropocene.
In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated Puerto Rican social and health inequalities. On March 8, 2020, the first suspected cases of COVID-19 were reported there (COR3 2020). A news report by El Nuevo Día identified patient zero as an Italian woman in her sixties traveling on a cruise (López Alicea 2020). Puerto Rico was still suffering from “the compounding effects of multiple disasters” (Garriga-López 2020, 269): the above-mentioned hurricane, Puerto Rican bankruptcy and unaudited debt (from 2016 onward), and a series of earthquakes that began to be felt in December of 2019. García et al. (2021, e264) argue that the COVID-19 outbreak worsened preexisting crises in Puerto Rico, creating “parallel pandemics” that exacerbate socioeconomic and health inequalities faced by its most vulnerable residents. While lockdown measures were imposed in Puerto Rico by the local government, it had very little control over travel restrictions and border controls. Because Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, it was excluded from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requirements, so American citizens did not need to provide a negative COVID test to travel to the archipelago. These measures put unnecessarypressure on Puerto Rico’s already strained health system, and it put vulnerable populations at risk. García et al. (2021, e264) argue that “demographically Puerto Rico has a larger proportion of adults aged 65 and older compared to mainland US and so a high prevalence of chronic conditions associated with increased risk of COVID-19.” The high proportion of adults over sixty-five in Puerto Rico is associated with the poor structural conditions of the archipelago, which, in turn, produces a system of inequalities in which young adults are often left no other choice but to migrate to other places (mostly the United States). Additionally—and similarly to the situation during Hurricane Maria—Garriga-López and Lerman Ginzburg (2024) argue that the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as social inequalities produced by colonialism, produced food insecurity and highlight the limitations of food sovereignty and food justice in this particular conjuncture.
Economic turmoil on the island, compounded by an unaudited debt that left Puerto Rico in a state of bankruptcy in 2016 and Puerto Ricans leaving due to poor living conditions in the archipelago, led to the displacement of many Puerto Ricans due to austere and neoliberal economic measures in the form of gentrification. Rojas-Lebron (2024, 5) highlights how “under Act 60, the combinations of Acts 20 and 22 passed in 2012 with the hopes of improving the economy, these outsiders—mainly finance and tech-investors” hoped, under these acts “to reduce their current federal income tax of 39.6% to a 0%–4% income tax rate.” These aggressive tax exemption policies for US residents led individuals in the high-income bracket to move to Puerto Rico, buying land and property. However, these measures also contributed to an increase in property prices, rent, and living costs, which were already incredibly high due to colonial laws such as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920.
How do we link this multifactorial colonial history and present to the Anthropocene? Decolonial scholar Maldonado-Torres (2019, 3) argues that “theAnthropocene began with the widespread colonial- ism and slavery: it is a story of how people treat each other.” In this sense, the Anthropocene needs to be explored through the lenses of coloniality to highlight how diverse forms of structural violence converge. In all the different instances mentioned, various activists criticize the poor living conditions created by coloniality. On Vieques, for example, the activism and civil disobedience of groups such as the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses, Congreso Nacional Hostosiano, Federación de Maestros, and the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño ultimately led to the US military’s departure in 2003. Similarly, in recent history, the Comisión Ciudadana, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Colectivo Moriviví, and Proyecto Matria, among many others, see the state of the Puerto Rican economy, feminism, trans rights, colonialism, and environmental racism as intersectional and conflating, not competing issues.
Epistemological approaches that stem from the Global North often refer to “human” interactionism as the defining element of the Anthropocene. Yet are they fully equipped to deal with climate change? The figure of the human has historically been constructed to encompass a select few (Wynter 2003). In the particular case of Puerto Rico, the logics of coloniality, the structural dynamics of racism, and exclusionary practices that do not allow Puerto Ricans food and reproductive sovereignty effectively put them in a category of “not-quite-human” (Weheliye 2014). Through reproductive justice scholarship, we can arrive at a more complete understanding that sheds light on “intersectional relations of oppression that shape reproductive relations and politics” (Schurr et al. 2025, 399). Thus, environmental reproductive justice highlights how an emphasis on mere reproductive choice and rights does not account for the multiplicity of issues, both historical and contemporaneous, that Puerto Rico is faced with. In Gaard’s (2010, 124) words “unlike the rhetoric of choice which relies on omission, an intersectional analysis of ecofeminist, environmental, and reproductive justice relies on inclusion by exploring the intersections among these various perspectives.”
In short, addressing the terminology and scientific tools used to manage and control populations as well as their environment is key to understanding coloniality in the Anthropocene. The case of Puerto Rico shows how a colonial context provides a laboratory for technologies of control and management, while eugenics has provided a convenient rationale for the subjugation of those who fall outside of the category of whiteness. This, in turn, leads to structural as well as individual processes of slow death through displacement, gentrification practices, environmental racism (Kaufman and Hajat 2021), reproductive injustices, and high risk of chronic illnesses. Environmental racism is particularly clear in the case of Puerto Rico, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency released considerably fewer disaster relief funds than for the other two concurrent disasters of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. Moreover, as Willison et al. (2021, 491) argue, this is “even more troubling given Puerto Rico’s fragile infrastructure…which was further curtailed by the debt crisis” and by “the island’s status as a territory, not a state.” Puerto Rico’s poor electric infrastructure relies mostly on fossil fuels, with power plants mostly located in Black communities such as Jobos Bay, which Hilda Lloréns (2021) describes as a form of climate apartheid, and which in turn causes adverse health effects and the exacerbation of multiple forms of social inequalities and structural violence. Nonetheless, Puerto Ricans are not passive subjects of coloniality; through social movements and collective actions, they have consistently seen these processes as intertwined. The recent development of “environmental reproductive justice” is an outcome that helps us think about and act in the Anthropocene in ways that recognize its deeply colonizing dynamics.