Predictive puericulture in Argentina: The Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social and the reproduction of Latin eugenics

Abstract

In April 2018, as the Argentine Congress debated decriminalizing abortion, local media revealed that public-health officials in a northern province had deployed an algorithmic system to predict teenage pregnancy. Public response to the technology quickly became entangled in society-wide debates about reproductive rights. Both proponents and detractors of the algorithmic system framed the technology as novel and cutting-edge. However, this paper argues for an analysis of the system not as a form of innovation or rupture but as a continuation of historical forms of biopolitical governance in Argentina, particularly puericultura, a eugenic theory of child rearing.