This chapter describes the several important roles for simulation in sexual and reproductive healthcare training. First and foremost, simulation training can serve as a tool for basic skill acquisition to learn abortion, contraception, and sterilization procedures.Simulation can also provide opportunities for improving counseling and communication, and emergency response team training. Finally, simulation training can foster an environment for discussion, advocacy, and sparking interest in the field of sexual and reproductive health.Many low- and high-fidelity simulation tools have been developed, implemented, and evaluated for training purposes.The chapter details the many available family planning simulation models and evidence supporting their utility.

Chapter 1 explores the gradual introduction of family planning to Cuban women, highlighting the Revolution’s centralization of state authority as well as its rejection of medical plurality. The chapter argues that medical leadership implemented policies that ultimately increased state control over women’s labor and reproductive decisions. Early public health models failed to include access to abortion and helped fuel rumors that the government had criminalized the procedures. But revolutionary leadership never responded to these popular rumors and instead emphasized the benefits of hospital births and the ideological dangers of birth control; evidence suggests that poor Afro-Cuban women and rural women were specific targets of this effort to regulate reproduction. By 1965, following an unexpected baby boom, the Ministry of Public Health began to provide women with some contraceptive options. But reproductive autonomy was not the goal of these reforms, and Cuban women’s persistent reliance on unauthorized abortions to regulate reproduction reveals that state health programs were not meeting the needs of all its citizens. The chapter shows that it was only after 1971 that both contraceptives and abortions became more available to Cuban women, reflecting a shift to bring the ideology more in line with that advanced by the Soviets.