Though I mentioned it in this post, I wanted to dedicate a short post to Cynthia Gorney's excellent piece in this month's National Geographic Magazine, Brazil's Girl Power. Here's a short excerpt:
"That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide."
Read the whole article here.
There's also a great photo gallery, a map, and interesting graphic.
Then, PBS did a short companion piece this week. Check it out below.
Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.
What does "Catholic domination" means? This myth of Brazilian politics and society being under heavy Catholic meddling is nothing but a generalization of events seen elsewhere in Latin America. Unlike the Spaniards, the Portuguese never shared power over their colonies with the Catholic Church. As a result Brazil has always had a very secular political culture. Pew has a research showing that, in the Americas, Brazil is second only to Canada in preferring that politics and religion be kept separate. Unfortunately that seems about to change: but this is not because of the Catholics; it's because the Catholic share of the population is decreasing and the Protestant one in increasing.
Posted by: RFS | September 01, 2011 at 08:24 PM
not "any" protestant... but the EVANGELICAL faction of protestants.
there are many "classical" protestants in southern Brazil... mostly lutherans... never tried to meddle with politics.
Posted by: Rogério Penna | September 08, 2011 at 01:25 PM