Hello.
Welcome to the eugenics podcast. I'm
Patrick Merricks.
And I am Marius Turda. Morning Marius. How
are you doing?
Very well, thank you Patrick. How are you?
Very good thanks.
Ready and raring to go. So today we're
talking about Christianity, family and
reproduction.
Recently I have this headline coming
out of Poland so
abortion access worsens amid pandemic.
What's happening in Poland at the moment,
Marius?
Debates about abortion are recurrent in
Poland, considered to be one of
the most catholic countries in Europe.
And there is, of course, very strong
opposition
to abortion and abortion laws
as much as there is very active
support for it. So we have here playing
out
some of the oldest debates about the
control of reproduction,
the future of the family and the nation,
and all within the Catholic environment
that is very much alive,
notwithstanding
50 years of communism. So some of the
eugenic and demographic
and population policy arguments we heard
in the interwar period
are now revived within this debate about
abortion and the control of reproduction, we see in certain
countries.
So, remarkably, we have this
link between
Christianity and eugenics. So in this
case we have Catholicism.
So who's this figure here and what was
this relationship?
This is one of the most important
Catholic
figures of the interwar period, the
Archbishop of Marseille,
and this is what they got
together
in 1930 to discuss the role of the
church
in promoting eugenics and it was
organized by the Association of
Christian Marriage.
It's very interesting that he says there
that there is a similarity between
eugenics
and Catholicism; he also says that
as long as it is within
carried out within Catholic morality it
is permitted;
in other words and it's a wonderful
expression there, you know, 'God
commanded man to multiply but he did not
wish him to multiply poorly'.
So for Catholics such as the
Archbishop of Marseille
there could be a similarity and a common
purpose
between Catholicism and eugenics and
others across Europe -
we've seen people in Italy or Hungary or
Poland or Austria in the interwar period,
important Catholic figures - they promoted
a similar,
positive eugenic message: it was about
the family; it was about the children; it was about
demography and about the quantity and
the quality of the population.
So also there was a link to 
to Anglicanism with eugenics and
interestingly from my experience
Anglicans were more accommodating to
to birth control and reproductive
control generally.
So what was the difference here? What was
this relationship?
The Anglican bishops were, and Anglicanism
in general, a bit more accommodating to eugenics
from the very beginning
because of the role played by figures
such as Barnes
and Dean Inge, the Dean of St. Paul's [Cathedral] in
the British eugenics movement. They
were members of the Eugenic Society, they gave
lectures to the Eugenics Society, they gave the 'Galton lectures', as we see here with Barnes. So, 
there is a very direct connection
between the Eugenic Society in Britain
and the Anglican Church,
through various figures. There was always
opposition to eugenics both
from Anglican Church Bishops or
Anglicans in general and as it was from
the Catholics, of course,
but you also have a lot of of synergy
and collaboration
and common
projects directed at
improving the biological and spiritual
quality of the population.
Discussions about the family; discussion
about divorce;
the birth control of the poor, which was
a big issue and debate in English
eugenics;
sterilization of the 'unfit'; but also
immigration
and other issues that Anglican
bishops felt they needed to engage with.
This leads us to a landmark moment in 
sort of Anglican history. It was the
Lambeth conference of 1930.
So what was the Lambeth conference
and what happened this year?
The Anglican bishops get together every
year to discuss issues of importance,
the issues of the day. So we mentioned a
few,
and in 1930 the topic of
conversation was about,
of course, the social and moral life of
society
and contraception was
high on the agenda. So the Lambeth
conference of 1930 allowed the use of
contraception in marriage.
So it became possible for couples to use
contraception
as long as they were married. It's very
important to highlight
this, so the this is a
landmark moment
in the debate about contraception,
abortion and, generally speaking, about
reproduction in the 1930s.
So this prompted a response, a few
months later, from the Catholic Church.
So Casti Connubii was a publication.
What did this represent?
Marriage was
essential to both of course Anglican and
Catholic
bishops, theologians and churches
and we've seen the Lambeth highlighting
this point: contraception was permitted within
the confines of marriage.
Marriage is the key word here. As well
Catholic church reacts to
that, but also reacts more broadly to the
popularity
negative eugenics is experiencing in
1930s, particularly in the Nordic
countries,
and to sterilization laws introduced in
America.
So you have a two-pronged reaction to, on
the one hand, the Lambeth conference
and the Anglican Church; on the other hand,
towards negative eugenics becoming too
popular and then and the states using that to
instrumentalize their program of
biological engineering. So the Catholic
Church reacts very violently against
the interference of the state
in matters it considers to be
private or belonging to
rather the church domain. So
it declares family and marriage to be
above
state interference - Casti Connubii is about the
christian marriage -
and also it criticizes the use of
contraception and birth control.
So it goes against, it's very pro-life.
And, we could see here, it is a discussion
about
who is able and should
prevent people from being
born, and this is one example we have,
from the
cyclical issued in 1930 by Pope Pius XI.
So many aspects of these arguments
actually sort of
survived the test of time so we have
this example
in Hungary so
what is this development we're looking
at?
The conversation about the sacrality
of marriage,
the importance of family
and within that the importance of the
nation
and the future of the country are very
strongly interrelated
and that kind of rhetoric about the
quality and the quantity,
particularly the quantity of the
population,
continues
to or to some extent gets even stronger
after 1945.
We could see that happening in South
America; it happened in Africa,
but we was also see it happening
in
in Eastern Europe under communism and
then it survives
and it re-emerges in various ways
in in the 1990s. So we had this example
from Poland but we could look at Hungary,
which is very keen of late to promote
pro-natalist demographic policy
to increase the number of Hungarian
families. So it is not enough to have,
it's essential to get married but it's
not enough to
just have one child or two children: you
need to have a strong,
numerically strong family, so
to ensure the survival of the nation and
of your country. So that rhetoric that
we're so familiar with from the interwar
period about
mothers of the nation and the national
responsibility of women
to reproduce for the sake of the nation
it's coming back very
very strongly.
So, interestingly, these conversations
are not just happening in
Catholic communities. Here we have a
news story from
Namibia and this is within the sort
of
a protestant community. So what's going on in Namibia? Are there any
differences, or?
We can see that at the moment both the
Anglican
and the Catholic cChurch agree
on the importance of promoting a more
pro-life agenda
and they are very much, at least segments
of it, very much
against the legalization of abortion.
So it's interesting to see these two
churches
agreeing on some of the fundamental
principles
of the debate about the family and
reproduction and christianity.
But at the same time we also see
the same obsession you have with the
future of
the children and the future of
the family. As
we saw that in the case of Hungary,
Poland
we see it here in the case of Namibia. So
you have this conflation
of concerns about quality
with concerns about quantity
of the nation and of the population. So
that remains very powerful within the
debate about
the control of reproduction in
present times.
Well it's been another fascinating
discussion, Marius.
I want to thank you for joining me
and also thanks to everyone for
tuning in again and also listening.
So, once again, Marius thank you and
see you next time.
Thank you, Patrick. Until
next time.
