Ricerc@Sapienza

Starting from the second half of the Nineteenth century, the Catholic doctrine was confronted with the practices of birth control and biopolitical intervention on the reproduction. In this perspective, the Congregation of the Holy Office – the guardian of the orthodoxy of the Catholic discourse – discussed questions such as therapeutic abortion, obstetrical practices, contraception, and artificial insemination. The inquisitors acquired knowledge on the practices of controlling human reproduction, and defined norms had power of law for Catholic discourse.

Starting from suggestions coming from most recent research, the monographic issue of «Contemporanea» aims at proposing a reflection on the forms of eugenics expressed in the second half of the twentieth century, in European and extra-European contexts, adopting a wide perspective, taking into consideration the ideological and theoretical dimensions, the relation with politics and citizenship policies, the continuity of ideas, people, structures and institutions between totalitarian and democratic contexts as well as the changes in the meaning of eugenics with regard to the developments of g