Religion and Reproduction: The Vatican as an Actor in the Global Field

Abstract

This article is an attempt to analyze the main religious actor in the world, the Vatican, as it is situated in the global context. Combining Roland Robertson’s concept of the ’global field’ with Foucaultian discourse analysis, the article demonstrates how the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) negotiates women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. The universal discourse of the RCC at the level of humankind in general is also negotiated at the international level (as this appeared at the Fourth World Conference on Women), at the national level (as my case studies in Chile and the Philippines demonstrate), and at the individual level (as my interviews in the shanty town of Huamachuco in Santiago de Chile show). And though the Roman Catholic Church situates itself as universal, hierarchical, and patriarchal, with a center in Rome, the analysis shows that it does not have a center, it is not doctrinally coherent, and individual women select from Catholicism only what they find useful. Universalist presuppositions about religion, therefore, seem to express Eurocentric, historically-biased epistemologies rather than the actual state of this religion today.