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...I began to inquire of my associates among the nurses what one could tell these worried women who asked constantly: "What can I do?" It is the voice of the elemental urge of woman--it has always been there; and whether we have heeded it or neglected it, we have heard it. Out of this cry came the birth control movement - Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race

Birth Control through the Ages
	The first method is the natural method. In the past, women used to nurse their children for two or three years. This would suppress ovulation protecting them from pregnancy.
2600 BC	1st known recipe for an abortefactant
	The 4,000-year-old Kahun Papyrus, the oldest written document on birth control, refers to vaginal pessaries made of crocodile dung and fermented dough.
1500 BC	The oldest know contraceptive was used in Egypt around 1500 BC. The women used a barrier of crocodile dung or honey
	They sound extraordinary, but may have had scientific properties. The crocodile dung (elephant dung was used later) was slightly alkaline, like modern-day spermicides.
1000 BC	In actuality, Egyptians wore condoms made out of fabric not as a contraceptive but as protection from insect bites. Condom use can be traced back several thousand years. It is known that around 1000 BC the ancient Egyptians used a linen sheath for protection against disease.
	In some cultures they imposed time periods when sex was not allowed such as Lent, various feast days or different religious holidays. This did lower the birth rate somewhat, but really had no basis in birth control.
	Jellies & Spermacides: Another ancient method of birth control was done with a resin or an oil that was applied to the cervix. This form of birth control is referred to as a suppository. Olive oil and honey were some of the most common substances used. This reduced the amount of sperm that could enter the vagina thus lowering the percentile of pregnancies. One of the best suppositories was a cloth soaked in vinegar; the acidity killed the sperm
	Olive oil, pomegranate pulp, ginger, tobacco juice were frequently smeared on or around the vagina. Many times the only effect these contraceptives had was that they killed or slowed the sperm down before reaching the egg. Still other women used mixtures of crocodile dung along with honey or gums from various trees. They would insert these mixtures prior to intercourse.
	Another Egyptian text from 1550 BC mentioned lint tampons soaked in the fermented tips of acacia shrubs. The mixture would have contained lactic acid - still used in spermicidal jellies.
	Aristotle described how to make the womb inhospitable to sperm by 'anointing that part…on which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or with ointment of lead or with frankincense, commingled with olive oil'.
	A male form of contraception done was called sub-incision. It was probably done as a ritual for some initiation and not necessarily for contraceptive reasons. It was done by cutting a small hole in the male urethra at the base of the penis so that during ejaculation semen leaked out the hole instead of being pushed up into the vagina. If the man wanted children he could put his finger over the hole so that he would ejaculate normally. He also needed to cover the hole when urinating.
	Intrauterine devices were also used in ancient times to stop fertilization. Hippocrates indicated that objects inserted into the vagina could stop pregnancy. This method was also used for animals. Arab camel drivers placed a stone inside the female’s uterus before long journeys.
	Historians attribute the intrauterine devices (IUDs) to the Arabs. They would stick pebbles into the uteruses of their camels to prevent them from getting pregnant on long trips across the desert or to market. What the IUD does is create a mild infection in the uterus that prevents the fertilization and implantation of eggs.
	A very common method of contraceptive that is still popular today is coitus interruptus. This is done by the male pulling out of the vagina just prior to ejaculation so that most of the semen does not enter. Another method similar to this is called coitus reservatus, and this was done by the male squeezing the base of penis so that he doesn’t ejaculate.
	Neither of these methods are fool proof against pregnancy as some semen escapes before ejaculation occurs. The first method was frowned upon by Catholicism and Judaism and other religions because they felt that men should not waste their seed. The second method did not waste the seed: it just stopped it before it came out. The ancient Chinese taught the second method, believing that if the man saved his unspent seed it could go to his brain, which would give him more strength and intelligence.
	The rhythm method is basically abstaining from intercourse during ovulation. Scientists were not able to determine which days were safe until 1930
	The history of oral contraceptives is as bizarre as the mixtures. Many oral contraceptives were drinks containing oils, fruits, grains, and other vegetable matter. Soranus suggested drinking the water that the blacksmiths used to cool hot metals. Other oral contraceptives included urine and animal parts along with mercury, arsenic, or strychnine.
	A potion made of mule's kidney and the urine of a eunuch was said to reduce potency.
	And the Hippocratic texts advised drinking copper sulphate to avoid pregnancy for one year.
	Gymnastics: Soranus suggested that Greek women jump backward seven times after intercourse. Women of Europe were encouraged to turn the wheel of a grain mill backwards four times at midnight.
	Male Contraceptives: Juniper berries on the penis were said to provide temporary sterility.
	"In Crete homosexuality was, according to Aristotle, officially supported as a population control tactic." p. 13
	Other early forms of birth control included bloodletting, glass or metal diaphragms, cotton soaked in lemon, dried fish, mercury and a variety of other herbs and chemicals. Sanskrit texts from India recommended salt-water douches, and also described 'coitus obstructus', which involved squeezing the base of the penis at the time of ejaculation to redirect semen into the bladder.
100-200 AD	The earliest evidence of condom use in Europe comes from scenes in cave paintings at Combarelles in France.
300s AD	St. Augustine lays down Catholic dogma sanctioning abortion up to 80 days for female fetus and up to 40 days for male fetus.
Middle Ages	"What was the relevance of the Christian discussion of fertility control to the status of women? It was once thought that the church held a special appeal for the oppressed, in particular slaves and women. In fact it clearly directed its attention at converting the urban male elite. Moreover, the most ascetic church fathers viewed women with fear and loathing; their greater concern was to shield young men from their seductions. The celebration of celibacy was accompanied by a denigration of women's reproductive power. The misogyny of even moderate Christians was quite striking. 'If it is not to generate children that the woman was given to the man as a helpmate', asked Augustine, 'in what could she be a help for him?'
	What was there in the Christian message that could appeal to women? The Christian defense of the celibate, contemplative life, which clearly had a powerful spiritual appeal, presented the option of avoiding marriage and childbearing altogether. Women who were attracted to such a life were not motivated by mere masochism. A genuine desire to overcome and redefine sex roles can be detected in such a choice. Marriage and the bearing of children had traditionally been policed by men to serve their purposes. Now women at least had a legitimate alternative.
	Similarly, the church's attack on the institutions what supported the sexual double standard - prostitution, slavery, adultery, divorce - may have served women's interests.
	Since land was the pre-eminent source of wealth, sons usually had to wait for a father's death or retirement to gain the economic independence that would permit the establishment of a new household. Moreover, a large portion never married. For those who did marry, short life expectancy combined with late age of marriage resulted in unions lasting only about fifteen to seventeen years and consequently low reproductive capacity. In addition, the high infant mortality rate depleted the number of children born; in Sicily only 1.7 children survived per family, compared to over four in Quercy
	"Abortion prior to ensoulment was certainly not considered by the church as homicide and would not be until 1917." p. 126
1200s AD	St. Thomas Aquinas states Catholic dogma justifying sexual intercourse only for procreation.
1300s AD	Islamic doctors of the 14th century advised the use of rock salt, tar, onion juice and oil of balsam on the penis, or tampons for women mixed with pomegranate pulp.
1500s AD	The first known published description and trials regarding prophylactic condom use were recorded in Italy. Gabrielle Fallopius claimed to have invented a sheath made of linen, and conducted trials amongst 1,100 men using the condom, none of whom became infected with Syphilis. Having been found useful for prevention of infection, it was only later that the usefulness of the condom for the prevention of pregnancy was
1562	The very first modern day contraceptive developed was the male condom. It was developed in 1562 to stop the spread of venereal disease. It was originally called the male sheath and was made of a lubricated linen cloth. Some later sheaths were made of goat bladders, animal intestines, or blowfish intestines. Since condoms were expensive and hard to get men would wash them and use them over.
1588 - 91	1588 – Pope Sixtus forbids all abortions; in 1591, Pope Gregory XIV rescinds Pope Sixtus’ edict against abortion
1600 AD	Douches also were used as birth control. French prostitutes had been using syringes to douche since 1600. This was seldom an effect method of contraceptive unless the douche was acidic
	In the past, barriers were the most effective. A barrier prevents the sperm from getting to the egg. Sea sponges made of soft wool were soaked in vinegar or lemon juice to create a spermicide. Sometimes half of a lemon was stuck in the vagina. Still other times a large wooden block was placed in the vagina but this was uncomfortable and deemed a device of torture. Oriental women used oiled paper "capping the cervix" was effective while European women used beeswax.
	Regarding colonial America: "So rare and so hushed was any public discussion of reproductive control that no laws or statues proscribed contraceptive practices. Abortion, on the other hand, was a serious offense in the eyes of both the law and the church." p. 39	Casanova blowing up a condom
1700s AD	Condoms made out of animal intestines began to be available. However they were quite expensive and the unfortunate result was that they were often reused. This type of condom was described at the time as "an armour against pleasure, and a cobweb against infection".
late 1700s	By the late eighteenth century, married women and even their husbands openly expressed displeasure over unchecked pregnancies." p. 41
1800s	By the nineteenth century Native American fertility-inhibiting herbal lore had penetrated deeply into American folk medicine. Native American plant lore included effective obstetrical botanicals, especially plants known in European medicine as oxytocics -- products believed capable of directly stimulating contractions in the smooth muscle of the uterus and thereby speeding childbirth
1821	Connecticut outlaws abortion after quickening, early abortions are legal
1831	"The works of two men were especially important in making reproductive control a more public matter. Robert Dale Owen's Moral Physiology, published late in 1830 or early 1831, was a concise, careful, logical argument about the need for fertility control, advocating the old method of coitus interruptus. In January 1832 appeared Charles Knowlton's The Fruits of Philosophy, full of concrete advice, especially on douching with spermicides. The two methods they emphasized -- Owen's requiring primary cooperation from the male, Knowlton's from the woman, became significant methods of fertility restriction throughout the rest of the century." p. 89	early condoms
	"Almost alone among nineteenth-century American advisers, Owen argued the importance of reproductive control for single women, noting that men who seduced women went unpunished by society, while women and their illegitimate offspring had to endure scorn and abuse. Unmarried women needed knowledge of "checks" as a defense against the "social brutality of illegitimate pregnancy." All sons, said Owen, "are not chaste and temperate," nor were all daughters "passionless and pure." A knowledge of preventives would save many from ruin and despair. Owen criticized the argument of some opponents of contraceptive knowledge who suggested that wives and daughters were virtuous only because they were ignorant of ways to prevent pregnancy. Such beliefs, Owen charged, slandered women and libeled the whole sex." p. 91
	"Knowlton presented the first detailed, explicit, and graphic account to be published in the United States on the 'physiology of the female genital system." His purpose, he said, was to "enable the reader to see how the checks effect their intended objet."
	By the fourth edition, Knowlton, no longer reticent about describing the male sexual organs, started the chapter on generation with a remarkably detailed discussion of testicles, the prostate gland, the penis, semen, and the role of "seminal animalcules" in conception. It remained one of the longest and least euphemistic discussions of male sexual anatomy in all the nineteenth-century popular literature offering sexual advice. Knowlton's understanding of the process of conception was largely inaccurate by today's knowledge, but even so, readers could have practiced more effective contraception for having read his book. . . .
	"In the 1830s and 1840s abortion drugs, condoms, cures for venereal disease, aphrodisiacs, and abortion were advertised in major urban newspapers of New England and the Middle Atlantic states." p. 190	rubber condoms
1844	Goodyear and Hancock began to mass produce condoms made out of vulcanised rubber. Vulcanisation is a process which turns crude rubber into a strong elastic material.
	"Before the 1860s there is little direct evidence that female lecturers disseminated contraceptive or abortive information.
1853	Esoteric Anthropology (Mary & Thomas Nichols) boldly argued a position she had long held: "If a woman has any right in this world it is the right to herself; and if there is anything in this world she has a right to decide, it is who shall be the father of her children and to choose the time for having them." . . . It defended the right of women to abort more boldly than any nineteenth-century sexual advisor except James Ashton: [T]he ovum belongs to the mother -- she alone has a right to decide whether it shall be impregnated. It is the same after pregnancy. It still rests with the mother. . . . It is an unnatural thing for her to refuse this sustenance -- it may be very wicked. But it is exclusively her own affair. The mother, and she alone has the right to decide whether she will continue the being of the child she has begun. The wishes of the father should weigh with her -- all obligations, moral, social, religious, should control her; but she alone has the supreme right to decide." p. 127
1861	The first advertisement for condoms was published in an American newspaper when The New York Times printed an ad. for "Dr. Power's French Preventatives."
1860s	After the Civil War increasing numbers of women lecturers on woman's rights linked feminist concerns to issues of health reform, especially gynecological and obstetrical problems, sexual physiology, reproduction, and maternity. They gave particular attention to women's need for sexual self-sovereignty and often veered easily into discussion of "voluntary motherhood," especially in the late 1860s and 1870s." p. 131
1873	The Comstock Law was passed. Named after Anthony Comstock, the Comstock Law made illegal the advertising of any sort of birth control, and it also allowed the postal service to confiscate condoms sold through the mail.
	Comstock has been Secretary and Special Agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice since 1873; also U. S. Post Office Inspector since the same year. He records that he has destroyed 160 tons of literature and brought 3,760 "criminals" to "justice" during these years.
	Regarding nineteenth century America: "There was no hard statistical evidence available on the number of abortions, but doctors asserted that up to a quarter of all conceptions were terminated." p. 191 There was no important technological breakthrough which explained the widespread decline of fertility in the later nineteenth century. The available methods required a sacrifice of pleasure (condoms, coitus interruptus, extended lactation and continence) or posed real danger (abortion). The fact that such means could be exploited successfully indicates the determination with which couples employed them. But the causes of such determination varied according to class and sex." p. 192
1877	In ex parte Jackson in 1877 the Supreme Court ruled that the Comstock Law did not deny free speech. Not until the Stopes case in 1931 did the Supreme Court rule that birth control discussions were not ipso facto obscene." p.286	"Skins:" condoms made from animal skins or intestines
	Besant & Bradlaugh win their court case over the publication of birth control materials in England
1882	First "modern" birth control clinic in the world opens in Holland, sponsored by trade unions.
1900s	But male and female surgical sterilisation was pioneered, and is now the most popular method of contraception around the world.
	The United States, which in the eighteenth century had experiences a fertility higher than that of Europe, also saw its rate being to decline steadily from the first decades of the nineteenth century, dropping by 50 % between 1800 and 1900.
	"But curiously, both the birth-control advocates and the medical professionals to whom the dramatic advances in fertility control have been usually attributed opposed many of the traditional means employed -- including those envied by the Italians -- as ineffective and dangerous." p. 205
	"The advice literature demonstrated a range of attitudes toward sexuality and sexual pleasure for married couples and does not support the arguments that Americans were curtailing their martial fertility by rigorous sexual abstinence." p. 188
	"With the fall in the demand for agricultural and unskilled labour, the large family lost its economic rationale." p. 200 "As the cost of rearing children rose, their numbers in working-class households began to decline." p. 201
	"If the fertility rate had been simply dictated by economic forces it could have been expected to oscillate, going up in good times and down in bad. But once the birth rate started to come down it never returned to its old level; it is difficult not to believe that women played an important role in such decision making. Once women knew they did not have to become pregnant, they viewed childbirth in a radically new way. The stoicism they often assumed when facing pregnancy was replaced with fears and concerns, despite the fact that the actual number of births they faced was declining. Giving birth did not, of course, suddenly cease to be so dangerous; that would not be true until the 1940s, when sulpha drugs became available to counter post-delivery infections. But the increased ability to avoid pregnancies and their resulting complications made women more, not less, determined to avoid them.
	Carl Degler has attributed the rise of birth control to nineteenth-century women's growing sense of individualism. No doubt it did play a role. Individualism was fostered by literacy; those who could read had a greater expectation of controlling their own destiny. And the literacy of women made the great difference; studies of nineteenth-century America revealed that literate wives had a lower fertility than illiterate wives married to men of the same class. Officially the neo-Malthusian line stressed individual decision making. But working-class women put greater stress on reciprocity, community, neighborhood assistance and mutuality. They took a pragmatic, unromantic view of marriage, taking domestic disputes in their stride and accepting the fact that the primary source of personal fulfillment would not be necessarily found in their spouse. Other women - mothers, sisters, friends -- provided emotional support. Contraceptive information accordingly spread via such networks. Population density was often correlated to fertility control, no doubt because a concentration of women allowed a passing on of advice. And the rapid diffusion of the low fertility ideal was, moreover, possibly due to the fact that female culture was less divided than male. In the dissemination of birth-control information, old sociability networks were turned to fresh purposed and new ones created." p. 202	euphemism for spermacide
	"The adoption of a family system in which large numbers of children are no longer culturally expected to provide wealth and social status had to precede the acceptance of modern contraception. Contraceptives can, is short, be most confidently predicted to work in a society where fertility rates are already dropping. But they can also undermine whatever success has already been gained by traditional fertility-control measures. For example, extended breast-feeding, which in the developing world is responsible for the avoidance of more pregnancies than any other birth-control method, can be threatened by hormonal contraceptives." pp. 253-254
1903	. In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt warned of the ‘race suicide’ of America’s Anglo-Saxon Protestants if they did not increase their birth rate relative to Asian, Italian and Jewish immigrants.
	Stopes and Sanger shared many of the same concerns. They both were alarmed by the high maternal and infant mortality rates associated with large families, and exploited the eugenic concerns for the need to improve the 'quality' of the race. Knowing that the middle class already restricted births, they sought to make accessible to lower-class women the contraceptives limited as yet to the better off. They both stressed the need for clinics supported by the government and directed by trained personnel to educate the public in contraceptive use. But most important of all, they sought on the one hand to play down the old, pessimistic, economic arguments usually trotted out by the neo-Malthusians in favour of birth control and on the other to purge the movement of any associations with sexual or political radicalism. Stopes and Sanger believed that the challenge was to make limitation of family size appear not simply economically necessary but morally acceptable. To do this, they developed the positive arguments that contraception was not only compatible with pleasure but essential if the woman's passions were to be allowed full expression.	Marie Stopes, early caps
1913	suddenly in the mid-1800s a sustained decline in fertility began. By World War I, family size was cut in half. the extensive use of contraception was signaled not so much by the drop in number of large families -- which might have been explained by lengthy periods of continence and extended nursing -- as by the increasingly early age at which women stopped giving birth
	The most striking example of the legacy of the campaigns against reproductive control can be found in Margaret Sanger's account of her fruitless six months' search in 1913 for contraceptive information in the best libraries in America. The doctors and nurses she consulted told her that if she did not avoid the subject she would run afoul of the Comstock laws. The feminists she talked with expressed shock at the idea of a public campaign for family limitation and argued that all efforts for women's autonomy should be concentrated first on obtaining the vote. Libraries yielded no information on the "secret" women wanted. ("Why was it so difficult to obtain information on this subject? Where was it hidden? Why would no one discuss it? . . . It was like the lost trail in the journey toward freedom.") Sanger searched the Library of Congress, the books in the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Boston Public Library. "At the end of six months I was convinced that there was no practical medical information on contraception available in America.	condom wrapper, 1910
1914	The Woman Rebel founded - only 7 issues
1916	Sanger & her sister, Ethel Byrne jailed for dispensing contraceptive information at first American birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY.	Margaret Sanger greets her supporters after her arraignment (resulting from establishing a birth control clinic)
1918	New York Court of Appeals empowers legally practicing physicians to prescribe contraceptives for married couples if necessary "to cure or prevent disease."
1920	Before the IUDs were the pessaries that were placed in vagina with a portion penetrating the cervix to enter the uterus. German gynecologist Grafenberg developed one from gut and silver wire in 1920. In 1965, women wore polyethylene pessaries but the woman had to be pregnant once before she could wear one. Then in the 1970s, copper pessaries were popular because any women could wear one.
1924	scientific confirmation of women’s ovulatory and fertility cycle.
early 1900s	Lemon juice was widely used in many cultures, and women of Eastern Europe still sometimes use half a squeezed lemon as a diaphragm, the citric acid acting as a spermicide.
	Earlier this century, tribal women in Africa used seed pods as a form of female condom. Legend suggests women of Rome in the first century used a goat's bladder for the same purpose.
	At the beginning of this century Margaret Sanger, a socialist and feminist from New York City, coined the term ‘birth control’. Sanger and her colleagues saw birth control as a way of freeing women from the yearly tyranny of pregnancy and birth. But there was a fine line between this and dictating who should be allowed to have babies. The famous anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested for distributing a pamphlet entitled Why and How the Poor Should Not Have Many Children. And Sanger too moved in that direction. From there it was a small step to ‘eugenics’ – the belief that society can be improved by selective breeding. Eugenicists felt that poverty was a sign of genetic inferiority. They maintained that rich people were superior to poor, whites superior to blacks and the able-bodied superior to the disabled. The eugenicists were to become a powerful force in the politics of population control. By 1932 compulsory sterilization laws for the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘physically defective’ had been passed in 27 states in the US.	early pessaries
1930s	"In the 1930s, the most popular methods used in Britain, were, in order, withdrawal, sheath, safe period and pessaries." p. 235	Margaret Sanger's 2nd periodical
	Pope Pius XI affirms Catholic dogma that every act of sexual intercourse is a sin unless performed with a reproductive intent.
1933	But it was German fascist leader Adolf Hitler who pushed eugenics to its most extreme. In 1933 Germany passed sterilization laws (modelled on those developed by the US Eugenics Record Office) which led to 200,000 sterilizations of ‘genetic inferiors’ and the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals in Nazi gas chambers.
1936	Sanger challenges the "Comstock Laws" by importing a package of diaphragms. In U.S. v. One Package, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the U.S. Tariff Act of 1930 cannot be construed to forbid the importing of contraceptives for use by physicians in saving lives or promoting well-being.
1940	Connecticut upholds a state statute that makes use of contraceptives illegal.
1944	In Britain in 1944 a panel of ‘experts’ were convinced that the decline in the birth rate was due to birth control and that it heralded the ‘moral decline of the nation’.
1950	In 1950 the American biologist Gregory Pincus was invited by the Planned Parenthood Federation in the US to develop an ideal contraceptive. Within a few years an oral birth control pill was being tested on 6,000 women – not Americans, but women from Puerto Rico and Haiti. In 1960, the first oral contraceptive (Enovid-10) was launched in the US market. The ‘Pill’ as it became known, heralded a revolution in birth control. Here at last, women were told, was a method that was both effective and safe. Women the world over embraced this new drug with enthusiasm. Within two years the Pill was being used by 1.2 million women and a decade later the numbers had risen to ten million.	The Pill
1960	The world's first contraceptive pill was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960, marking a major breakthrough in effective, reversible contraception.
1965	In Griswold v. Connecticut, U.S. Supreme Court rules Connecticut’s law prohibiting birth control for married couples violates a newly defined right of marital privacy.
1970s	"In England, as late as the 1970s, 'the Medical Defense Union advised practitioners not to fit an intra-uterine device for a woman without the consent of her husband.' "p. 237
1971	Congress repeals most of the provisions of the federal "Comstock Laws."
1976	India became a keen advocate of birth control, a policy which eventually culminated in the mass sterilization of 6.5 million people in 1976 during the ‘Emergency’ of Indira Gandhi (below). Hundreds died from infections due to botched operations and the program sparked riots and demonstrations in many cities, leading to the Government’s fall in 1977.
	Congress adopts the first Hyde Amendment barring the use of federal Medicaid funds to provide abortions to poor women. This action marks the beginning of a continuing series of amendments to federal laws in order to restrict abortion access to various groups of people receiving medical care through the government.
1980s	By the 1980s, something like 90 per cent of married couples in most western countries were employing contraceptives. An international survey of contraceptive users found that 33 per cent had been sterilized, 20 per cent employed the oral contraceptive, 15 per cent the IUD and 10 per cent the condom. It needs to be stressed, however, how recent this shift to modern fertility-limitation methods is. In countries like France and Czechoslovakia, for example, withdrawal was still, until the arrival of the pill in the 1970s, the most widely employed means of birth control." p. 252
1983	In the same year Dr Reimert Ravenholt, the head of USAID’s population office, publicly hinted that the Agency intended to sterilize a quarter of all women in the developing world. Today 90 per cent of the 137 million women who have undergone surgical sterilizations are in the Majority World – 32.5 million as a result of mass campaigns in China in 1983 and 1991. In several Asian nations, substantial rewards, including cash hand-outs, have been offered to people who undergo permanent sterilizations. These financial incentives are difficult to resist when people are poor and hungry. Or indeed, if they are offered no other options for birth control.
1990	"Today, the married, one they have achieved a desired family size, increasingly accept sterilization as the simplest and safest way to avoid pregnancy. Over a third of North American males eventually have a vasectomy. The percentage of couples who rely on sterilization for fertility control is, however, not really comparable to that using other methods which can be employed and abandoned; sterilization reversals have a 50 to 75 per cent success rate, but entail expensive medical procedures. Sterilization has other drawbacks, including its culturally perceived threat to virility. The fact that the vasectomy is a far safer and simpler operation than tubal litigation, but that in most countries the latter operation is more common, suggests women pay a high price for fertility control."
2000	At the turn of the Millennium, the UN Population Fund estimates 50 per cent of couples use modern methods of contraception, and a further eight per cent practise natural or traditional methods
	FDA approves Mifeprex (RU 486 - the French abortion pill) for use in U.S.