Population Control in Puerto Rico: The Format and Informal Framework (1960)

LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS

POPULATION CONTROL

A (TABLE OF CONTENTE ON INSIDE COVER)

SCHOOL OF LAW • DUKE UNIVERSITY

VOL XXV

SUMMER, IV60

No.3

LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS j il

A QUARTERLY PUBLISHED BY THE DUKE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

!

Melvin G. Shimm, Editor

!

Robinson o. Everett, Associate Editor

j;

Editorial Advisory Board

|

JoHN S. Bradway, Robert Kramer, Weston LaBarre, Elvin R. Latty, Joseph J. Spengler, Dale F. Stansbury, Robert R. Wilson, and Clive M. Schmitthoff (London).

VoLüME 25

SUMMER,1960

Number 3

CONTENTS POPULATION CONTROL

Foreword WoRUJ POPULATION Growth WoRLD Resources AND Technology PopULATiON,Space, AND HuMAN CuLTURE

Melvin G.Shimm 377 Robert C. Coo\ 379 L. Dudíey Stamp 389 .Henry B. van Loan 397

Qualitauve Aspects of Population Conirol: Eugenios and Euthenics

Frederic\ Osborn 406 Christopher Tietze 426

The Current Status of Fertility Control A Román Cathouc View of Population Control

pace

Norman St. John-Stevas 445

A ProTéstant View of Population Control

Richard M.Fagley 470

Population Policies in the Sino-Soviet Bloc W.Par\er Mauldin 490 Population Trends and Controls in Undewieveloped Countries 5°^ Population Control in Japan; Economic Théory

AND Its AppLicatton.

Mortin Bronfenbrenner and John A.Buttric^ 536

PoPULATTON Control in Puerto Rico; The Formal and

Informal Framework

Kurt W,Bac\, Reuben HUI,and J. Mayone Stycos 558

Population Control in India: Progress and Prospects

S.N. Agarwala 577

The Legal anD Political Aspects of Population

Control in the Ünited StatEs

Alvah W. Sulloway 593

SoME Observattons on the Polittcal Economy

OF Population Growth

Arthur S. Miller 614

Views expressed in artídes published iri this períodieál are to be attributed to their authors and

not to the periodicali its editors, or Duke University.

PUBUSHED QUARIBRLY

WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN

Sübscriptions: Ü. S. & Possessions $7.50; Foreign $8.00. Single copies $2.50

(A supply of copies of alí issues is provided tó fill orders fof singlé numbers) For ínfpnnatión aboüt microfilñi (copies are now avaiiable in this form) write: University Microfílms» 313 N. First St., Ann Arbpr, Mich.

Address aJl coinmuñicatíons to Law ano CoÑtEMPORARy Problems

Düké Staiion, DtmHAM, North Carolina Copyright, 1960, by

Énteréd as secoM-cIass mattér December 10, 1946, at the post pMée, Darhairij North Garolina, ünder the Act of March 3, i$79

POPULATION CONTROL IN PUERTO RICO: THE FORMAL AND INFORMAL FRAMEWORK» KuRT W.BACKt Reuben HillÍ

J. Mayone Stycos**

In the last two decades. Puerto Rico has become a model o£ the progress possible

to underdeveloped countries. By any índices, its economic and social changas have been astounding. Rehabilitation of agriculture; creation o£ industry; exploitation o£ natural resources and o£ scenery £or tourist trade; extensión o£ social welfare, health, and educational services; and ingenious attempts at constitutional innovations

have made the Puerto Rican story an example o£ possible achievement £or countries in similar conditions.

In common with other modernizing countries. Puerto Rico has experienccd R remarkable population increase.^ Xhe population has doubled between 1910 and 1950, and Puerto Rico is now a coimtry with one o£ the highest population densities in the world, twelve times as high as that o£ the continental United States, and •The writers of this article jointly directeil the Family in Puerto Rico project and authored The Familv and Population Control; A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Chance (1959). upon which much of this article is based and from which all data not ascribed to other sources have been drawn.

t B.S. 1940, New York University; M.A. 1941, University of California at Los Angeles; Ph.D, 1949, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Associate Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, Duke Univer sity. Author, [with Reuben Hill & J. Mayone Stycos] The Family and Population Control; A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Chance (1959); [with J. Mayone Stycos] The Survey Under Unusual

Conditions (1959); [with L. Festinger & S. Schachter] Social Pressures in Informal Groups (1950)Contributor to periodicals of articles on field experiments, communication and influence, and family planning.

ÍB.S. 1935, Utah State University; Ph.M. 1936, Ph.D. 1938, University of Wisconsin. Director,

Minnesota Family Research Center, and Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. Author, [witíi

J. Mayone Stycos & Kurt W. Back] The Family and Population Control; A Puerto Rican Experiment IN' Social Chance (1959); Sociology of Marriage and Family Behavior (1958); [with Howard Becker et aL\ Family, Marriage, and Parenthood (ad ed. 1955); [with J. Joel Moss & Claudine G.

Wirths] Eddyville's Families (1953); [with Evelyn M. Duvallj When You Marry (rev. ed. I953); [with W. W. Waller] The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (1951); Families Under Stress

(1949); [with Howard Becker et al.] Marriage and the Family (1942); and research nionographs on family sociídogy. ** A.B. 1947, Princeton University; Ph.D. 1954, Columbia University. Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University. Author, [with Reuben HUI & Kurt W. Back] The Family and Population Control; A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Chance (1959); [with Kurt W. Back] The Survey Under

Unusual Conditions (1959); Family and Fertility in Puerto Rico (1955). Contributor to periodicals

of a^rticles on demography, fertility control, and research methods.

The Puerto Rican vital statistics are taken from Puerto Rico Department of Health, Monthly Vital Statistics Reports.

Puerto Rico

559

surpassing the other Caribbean islands by more than two-thirds. The reason for

this is a rapid decline in the mortality rate that was not accompanied by decline in the fertility rate. The death rate has dropped from about twenty per thousand as rccently as thirty years ago, to 6.8 per thousand in 1959, a rate that compares favorably with the most advanced western countries.^ The main reason for this is the

eflectíveness of recent advances in public health on the island. For instance, there

have been no deaths from malaria recorded in the three years 1957, 1958, and 1959; previously, malaria was a major cause of death. Two other diseases that are important causes of death in tropical countries have similarly declined: intestinal

diseases, because of the improvement in the water supply; and tuberculosis, because of the development of new drugs. Mortality attributable to these causes has declined by one-third even within the last decade. On the other hand, the birth rate has

stayed rather steadily around forty per thousand from 1910-1950 and has only started to drop since 1950.

The population increase has produced serious problems. Puerto Rico has been more fortúnate than other countries in similar conditions, in that it enjoys unrestricted migration to the continental United States. The large-scale migration to the major continental cities has alleviated the population problem in Puerto Rico itself, but it has also given the population problem widespread attention. Migra tion is only a partial solution, at best, and never has absorbed the total natural in crease in population. The problems of Puerto Rican minorities in New York,

Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities, too, have shown the dangers of relying on large-scale migration to urban centers. In the long run, only a decline in the birth rate can achieve demographic equilibrium.

The question posed by the unequal decline in birth and death rates is not new.

It was experienced in western Europe at the beginning of the industrial revolution

and was followed, after about seventy years, by a corresponding decline in birth rate. Thus, we might expect that after a similar lapse of time, the countries that are now starting on the path to urbanization and industrialization will reach, again, a

tolerable equilibrium. But while the conditions during the last century were quite

favorable to the sudden spurt of population, principally because of the opening of new areas to settlement, the question is somewhat more urgent now. There is no frontier to move to, and within the country, the additional population threatens to nullify hard-won economic and social gains. Technical, economic, and social reforms

do not have to be slowly created today, as during the last centuries in the West, but can be speedily adopted; similarly, control of fertility needs an accelerated pace to keep step with the other changes occurring in the country.

As it has with other social problems. Puerto Rico has confrontcd the question of fertility control early and has tried to deal with it. A recent small but consistent drop in birth rates has signified the possibility of success in this effort, and this ® By comparison, the United States death rate was 9.4 in 1959. Nat'l Office of Vital Statistics, U.S. Dep*t of Health, Education, and Welfare, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, April 1960, p. 5.

y6o

Law and Contemporary PrOBLEN£S

experience may aííord valuable insights into the population problems of many other inodcrnizing countries. The peculiar emotions that are engendered by the question -of birth control make Puerto Rico an especially apt place for the study of possible

■developments. Excessive population increase that may threaten the adequacy of resources and public services is a subject for public policy and has increasingly been recognized as a legitimare concern of public health. More than most other topics, however, it aííects personal feelings and intímate relationships that are con-

«idered prívate matters. In all phases of Puerto Rican development, there has been ^reat concern about assuring local participation and individual and group develop

ment as necessary conditions for any successful policy. This is owing partly to the •commitment of the administration to consider personal development of the indi

vidual as the goal beyond economic advances, and partly to the general ethos of

'dignity that has been noted by many observers of the Puerto Rican scene. Thus, Puerto Rico lends itself well to the discussion of a topic that is so important for the •community and deep-rooted in individual concerns.

Puerto Rico's concern with its population problem, in conjunction with its respect for the individual and belief in scientific planning, has led to a series of investiga-

tions of the general beliefs, attitudes, and practices surrounding birth control. This has provided extensive information about family planning in Puerto Rico and has

made it possible to put the question into a more general perspective. Before turning to a discussion of Puerto Rican conditions, however, an outline of a general logical scheme under which social changes of this kind can profitably be considered may

he illuminating.

Propositíons concerning possible acts can be considered from two points of view:

whether the statement is true or false, and, accordingly, whether the act is possible or not; and whether the act is right or wrong, and, accordingly, whether the act is forbidden or allowed. The former comprises the realm of alethic modal logic;

the latter, of deontic modal logic. These types are extensions of two-value formal

logic and are useful for the explication of such concepts as possibility, necessity,

obligation, and permission. No formal exposition of these systems will be given here, hut they will be developed as far as is necessary for a classification of activities for the purpose of this discussion.®

Modal logics are created by the addition of logical constan ts to the familiar set of constants: negation, disjunction, conjunction, implication, and equivalence. For alethic modal logic, the constants refer to necessity and possibility and opérate on single propositíons, as negation does. Thus, we can say of a given proposition t:hat it is possible or that it is not necessary. We shall restrict the system and exelude

^mbinatíons of possibility and necessity, avoiding involved expressions such as:

It is necessary that it is possible that. . . ." With this restriction, a proposition can

This scheme b based directly on the work of Alan R. Anderson. Cf. Alan R. Anderson, The

ORMAL Analysis op Normative Systems (1956); Anderson, The Logic of Norms, in i Logic Analysb

°4 (1958). Hb work b, in turn, a development of treatments by yon Wright and Prior. The exposinon of alethic and deontic modal 'logic foHows closely Anderson.

Puerto Rico

561

appear in six forms o£ alethic modality: it can be asserted or denied, it can be possible or not possible, it can be necessary or not necessary. These six modalities can

be arranged in order of truth valué, starting with assertion and ending with denial,

the two modalities o£ ordinary two-value logic. As an example, let us display the proposition "people use birth control" in all modalities, arranged in order: 1. People use birth control.

2. It is necessary that people use birth control.

3. It is possible that people use birth control.

4. It is not necessary that people use birth control.

5. It is not possible that people use birth control.

6. People do not use birth control.

Deontic modal logic is created by the addition o£ the two constants o£ obligation and permission. This leads to £our modalities, assertion and negation having no

place along a normative continuum. Using the same example, they are arranged as £ollows:

1. It is obligatory that people use birth control.

2. It is permitted that people use birth control.

3. It is not obligatory that people use birth control.

4. It is not permitted that people use birth control.

It can be seen that the systems are very similar in their structure. In £act, under certain assumptions, the deontic system can be reduced to the alethic system. This is done by substituting £or the £orm

is obligatory" the implication, if ^ is not

done there is a sanction," and similarly £or the other £orms. This assumed equiva lence between norms and sanctions corresponds certainly to the legal point o£ view.

It may not be as evident in other social contexts, however, and complete equivalence o£ these two statements will not be assumed here. By cross-classi£ying these modali ties, we can categorize each act according to its £easibility and its con£ormance to a

normative standard. There are twenty-£our categories (six alethic modalities times £our deontic modalities). The truth and normative valúes oí each category show whether an act £alling into it is likely to be per£ormed. The consistency o£ the two valúes will show strain in the society on this topic. For instance, an act that is obligatory and necessary, or not permitted and impossible, will arouse little con ict.

An act that is possible and not permitted, however, may lead to difficult situations, in the extreme, definitions o£ acts as necessary and not permitted are rare and i c y

to be unstable. Within a society, acts that are necessary and obligatory and their opposites will be supported by the institutional structure o£ the society. Acts that fall in the center of the continuum, which are permitted and possible, are left to individual decisions.

The assignment of an act to a particular category may change in a given society.

Acts that are introduced into the society move from negation that is, they are not done—to various stages of feasibility and may there encounter various relationships