Family planning

Throughout history mankind has tried to limit family size (Glasier, 2002). Until the twentieth century this was achieved largely by abstinence, infrequent coitus, coitus interruptus and breast feeding. Although male condoms were described as long ago as 1350 BC and cervical caps were first produced in 1830, ‘modern’ methods of contraception have only been around for some one hundred years and hormonal contraception for only about fifty years.

Spurred on by fears about over-population, the Family Planning Movement can be said to have begun in the mid-nineteenth century when the Malthusian League argued the case for fertility control (AbouZahr, 1999). Motivated later by concerns for women whose lives were dominated by childbearing, the first family planning clinic was opened in Amsterdam in 1882. In the early twentieth century, clinics were opened in a number of developed countries by women whose names have become inexorably linked to family planning, such as Margaret Sanger in the USA and Marie Stopes in the UK (Leathard, 1980). Renewed concern about the ‘population explosion’ in the middle of the twentieth century led to the establishment of national family planning programmes, starting in India in 1952 and expanding rapidly over the next 40 years, so that by 1994 over 120 countries around the world had national family planning programmes (Cleland et al., 2006). These programmes classically formed part of socio-economic development plans and were institutionalised in government ministries.