Pioneering In Family Planning

   To honor the 40th anniversary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, journalist Perdita Huston travelled the world to gather this remarkable collection of oral histories of and about the often unknown leaders of a worldwide movement to bring women their reproductive rights. Drawing on personal interviews, Huston delineates the motivations, strategies, and heartaches of twelve pioneers-eight women, four men-both from the developing world, before and after colonial rule, and from industrialized countries, who braved scorn and abuse to raise the issues of family planning, contraception, and sex education, and to fight for improved healthcare for women. These moving testimonies reflect the personal leadership style of each pioneer from Dr. Evangelina Rodriquez, the first woman doctor in the Dominican Republic, who defied church policies and the corrupt dictator Trujillo to promote family planning and fight the spread of venereak disease; to Miyoski Ohba who contended with innumerable taboos in postwar Japan to introduce poor villagers to the use of condoms; to Elsie Ottsen-Jensen, born in 1886 to a poor Norwegian family of 17 children, who became acutely aware of the high rate of maternal mortality throughout turn-of-the-century Scandinavia and went on to found the Swedish Association of Sex Educators in 1933. Motherhood by Choice stands as a significant historical document tracing the development of public health services, sex education, and contraceptive services that will inspire and inform all who are concerned about women's health and reproductive rights.

This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garrett, was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers – niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist and campaigner for equal rights for women. Margery Spring Rice continued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years after Marie Stopes founded the first clinic in Britain. Engaging and accessible, this biography weaves together Spring Rice’s personal and professional lives, adopting a chronological approach which highlights how the one impacted the other. Her life unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of the early twentieth century – a period which sees the entry of women into higher education, and the upheaval and societal upshots of two world wars. Within this context, Spring Rice emerges as a dynamic figure who dedicated her life to social causes, and whose actions time and again bear out her habitual belief that, contrary to the Shakespearian dictum, ‘valour is the better part of discretion’. This is the first biography of Margery Spring Rice, drawing extensively on letters, diaries and other archival material, and equipping the text with family trees and photographs. It will be of great interest to a range of social historians, especially those researching the birth control movement; female friendships, female philanthropists, and feminist activism in the twentieth century; and the history of medicine and public health.

The striking upsurge in population growth rates in developing countries at the close of World War II gained force during the next decade. From the 1950s to the 1970s, scholars and advocacy groups publicized the trend and drew troubling conclusions about its economic and ecological implications. Private educational and philanthropic organizations, government, and international organizations joined in the struggle to reduce fertility. Three decades later this movement has seen changes beyond anyone's most optimistic dreams, and global demographic stabilization is expected in this century. The Global Family Planning Revolution preserves the remarkable record of this success. Its editors and authors offer more than a historical record. They disccuss important lessons for current and future initiatives of the international community. Some programs succeeded while others initially failed, and the analyses provide valuable guidance for emerging health-related policy objectives and responses to global challenges.