why is the development of a rational outlook on birth control necessary in India today

, the voluntary limiting of human reproduction, using such means as sexual abstinence, contraception, induced abortion, and surgical sterilization. It includes the spacing as well as the number of children in a family.

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  • en records of birth control methods survive from ancient times. Methods are mentioned among the various formulas and remedies recorded in the Ebers papyrus, a compilation of Egyptian medical texts dating from 1550 bc. Classical writers, including Pliny the Elder, Pedanius Dioscorides (De materia medica,c. ad 77), and Soranus of Ephesus (On Midwifery and the Diseases of Women, c. ad 100), refer to contraception and abortion. Several authors from the flowering of Arabic medicine in the 10th century mention contraception, notably ar-Rāzī (Rhazes; Quintessence of Experience), Ali ibn Abbas (The Royal Book), and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; The Canon of Medicine). The methods recommended by these early commentators fall into three groups: the reasonable but probably ineffective, such as wiping out the vagina after intercourse (Soranus); the reasonable and perhaps effective, such as using honey, alum, or lactic acid as spermicidal barriers (Ebers papyrus, Dioscorides, and Soranus); and the mystical and manifestly ineffective, for example suggesting that the woman jump backward seven times immediately after coitus (Soranus).

By 1900 all the methods of birth control now in use, with the exception of oral contraceptives, were understood and available in Europe and North America. The first to be developed was the condom. Folklore attributes the invention to a Dr. Condom, said to have been alarmed by the number of illegitimate offspring of Charles II of England. It is more likely, however, that the name derives from the Latin condus, for receptacle. The earliest published description is by the Italian anatomist Gabriel Fallopius in 1564. The first condoms were made from animal intestines and for the most part were used to prevent sexual transmission of disease. When Charles Goodyear discovered the process for vulcanization of rubber in 1839 he initiated a revolution in contraception, as well as transport, and condoms have been a popular choice for birth control since the second half of the 19th century. The use of vaginal barriers (diaphragms and caps, which are commonly used with spermicides) was recorded by the German physician F.A. Wilde in 1823. The medical forerunner of the intrauterine device was the stem pessary, first described and illustrated in 1868. By 1909, Richard Richter, a practitioner from near Breslau (Wrocław in present-day Poland), had described most of the advantages and disadvantages of this method of birth control. Vasectomy, or male sterilization, was practiced in the 19th century, and the first female sterilization by surgical occlusion of the fallopian tubes was performed by a U.S. surgeon in Ohio in 1881. The surgical techniques of induced abortion in use today were also known in the 19th century. In the 1860s an Edinburgh gynecologist, James Young Simpson, described a procedure for “dry cupping” the uterus. The procedure adumbrated vacuum aspiration, a method commonly used today for performing legal abortion.

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The fact that conception was more likely to take place during certain phases of the menstrual cycle than others was suspected by classical authors. Adam Raciborski, a Paris physician, noted in 1843 that brides married soon after their menstruation often conceived in that cycle, while if the wedding occurred later in the cycle they commonly had another period before pregnancy occurred. Hermann Knaus in Austria (1929) and Kyūsaku Ogino in Japan (1930) independently and correctly concluded that ovulation occurs 14 days prior to the next menstruation. In 1964 an Australian medical team, John and Evelyn Billings, showed how women could monitor changes in their cervical mucus and learn to predict when ovulation would occur.

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“The greatest invention some benefactor can give mankind,” wrote Sigmund Freud in the early years of the 20th century, “is a form of contraception which does not induce neurosis.” Many of the elements to meet the goal of a new, more acceptable form of contraception were present about the time of World War I, yet two generations were to reach maturity before those elements were exploited. The role of hormones from the ovary was understood early in the 20th century by Walter Heape and John Marshall. The first extract of estrogen was produced in 1913, and the pure compound was isolated by the Americans Willard Allen and Alan Doisy in 1923. At this time an Austrian physiologist, Ludwig Haberlandt, was carrying out experiments on rabbits to apply the new-found knowledge of hormones for contraceptive ends. By 1927 he was able to write, “It needs no amplification, of all methods available, hormonal sterilization based on biologic principles, if it can be applied unobjectionably in the human, is an ideal method for practical medicine and its future task of birth control.” Hostile public attitudes made research on birth control virtually impossible, however, and Haberlandt’s ideal was not realized until the 1960s.

Users

In the Old Testament story of Onan (Genesis 38:8–10), Judah ordered his son Onan to sleep with Onan’s recently widowed sister-in-law, but Onan refused on the ground that “the descendants would not be his own, so whenever he had relations with his brother’s wife, he let [the seed] be lost on the ground.” As a punishment God killed him, although it is unclear whether the punishment was for his practice of coitus interruptus or for filial disobedience. Perhaps the earliest first-person account of contraception comes from the verbatim records of the Inquisition. During a trial of Albigensian heretics from the village of Montaillou in France in the early 14th century, Beatrice, the mistress of one of the accused, berates her lover, asking “What shall I do if I become pregnant by you?” He replies, “I have a certain herb. If a man wears it when he mingles his body with that of a woman he cannot engender, nor she conceive.” The method was almost certainly mystical and inefficacious. James Boswell in his London Journal, 1762-63 records a more practical experience (for May 10, 1763) when he picked “up a strong young jolly damsel, led her to Westminster Bridge and there, in armour complete, did I enjoy her upon this noble edifice.” It is notable that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, most accounts of the use of contraceptives relate to illicit sex.

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The 17th-century European upper classes, many of whom had their infants wet-nursed, felt the pressure of excess births within marriage, both physically and emotionally. A French aristocrat writing in 1671 to her daughter, who had borne three children by age 22, recommends, “Continue the nice custom of sleeping separately and restore yourself . . . I kiss your husband. I like him even better in his apartment than in yours.” Queen Victoria later expressed a similar sentiment: “Men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through [childbirth] very often.”

In the 19th century better diet, more stable political conditions, and improvements in water supply and hygiene and other simple advances in public health began to bring down the death rate. For the first and probably the last time in the history of industrialized nations a large family became the rule. Eighteenth-century France had seen an overall decline in the birth rate, probably brought about by increasing use of coitus interruptus, and most of western Europe followed suit in the 19th century. In 1860 a quarter of all marriages in England and Wales had eight or more children, but by 1925, 50 percent had only one or two children and one in six was childless. In the United States a similar decline in fertility began slightly later: in 1830 the crude birth rate for white Americans was 50 per 1,000, but by 1930 it was only 18 per 1,000.

Among English couples married before 1910 only 15 percent used a method of birth control, while among those married in the years 1935–39, 66 percent used a method. In 1982 in the United States 67.9 percent of married couples aged 15 to 44 used a contraceptive method and another 14 percent were seeking to be pregnant, were pregnant, or had just delivered. There was little variation by religion or race (61 percent of black couples and 69.6 percent of white couples using a method). The commonest method was female sterilization (one-quarter of all users), followed by the contraceptive pill (one-fifth). About 15 percent of couples used condoms, and another 15 percent relied on male sterilization. Fewer than one in 20 couples used periodic abstinence.

In developing countries where family planning services have been emphasized by the government or private organizations, prevalence of contraception usually rises rapidly. In Thailand, for example, use jumped from 15 percent in 1970 to nearly 60 percent in 1981. In Mexico it rose from 30 percent in 1976 to more than 40 percent in the 1980s and in Bangladesh from 8 percent in 1975 to more than 20 percent in 1984. There has been less success, however, in countries with weak birth control services.

Social And Political Aspects Of Birth Control Early advocates

In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population. It posed the conundrum of geometrical population growth’s outstripping arithmetic expansion in resources. Malthus, who was an Anglican clergyman, recommended late marriage and sexual abstinence as methods of birth control. A small group of early 19th-century freethinkers, including Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place (himself the father of 15 children), and John Stuart Mill, suggested more pragmatic birth control methods such as coitus interruptus, vaginal barriers, and postcoital douching. Robert Dale Owen, the son of a Scottish social reformer, helped spread these revolutionary ideas in North America, and in 1832 a Massachusetts physician and freethinker, Charles Knowlton, wrote a slim book called The Fruits of Philosophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married People. Although Knowlton’s first edition was published anonymously, he was fined and imprisoned. The book appeared in England two years later and continued to be read for the next 50 years. In 1876 a Bristol publisher was prosecuted for selling The Fruits of Philosophy. Incensed, Charles Bradlaugh, the leader of Britain’s National SecularSociety and subsequently a member of Parliament, and Annie Besant reissued the pamphlet and notified the police. They were charged and tried, the public prosecutor claiming “this is a dirty, filthy book,” but the conviction was quashed on grounds of a faulty indictment. The trial received wide publicity and, through the national press, brought birth control onto the breakfast table of the English middle classes at a time when, for economic reasons, they were eager to control their fertility. The Malthusian League, founded some years earlier by George Drysdale, began to attract wide public support. Similar leagues began in France, Germany, and The Netherlands, the latter opening the world’s first family planning services, under Dr. Aletta Jacobs, in 1882.

But it was two women, Margaret Sanger in the United States and Marie Stopes in Britain, who were to make birth control the object of a national, and ultimately global, social movement. Both used the controversy that surrounded birth control as a ready way of attracting attention. Sanger, a trained nurse, encountered miserable conditions in her work among the poor. She was inspired to take up her crusade when she attended a woman who was dying from a criminally induced abortion. In 1914 she started a magazine, The Woman Rebel, to challenge laws restricting the distribution of information on birth control. She was indicted and fled to Europe, but when she returned to stand trial in 1916 the charges against her were dropped. Later that year she opened a family planning clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York, but the police immediately closed it, and Sanger was arrested and convicted on charges of “maintaining a public nuisance.” After many vicissitudes, a compromise was struck and family planning clinics were allowed in the United States on the condition that physicians be involved in prescribing contraceptives. In 1936 a New York court, in a case known as United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, ruled that contraceptives could be sent through the post if they were to be intelligently employed by conscientious physicians for the purpose of saving life or promoting the well-being of their patients.

The movement for birth control was led in Britain by Marie Stopes, the daughter of a middle-class Edinburgh family. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in botany (from the University of Munich in 1904). In 1918 she published an appeal for sexual equality and fulfillment within marriage, Married Love, which at the time was considered to be a radical text. Margaret Sanger met Marie Stopes and persuaded her to add a chapter on birth control. While Sanger’s advocacyemphasized the alleviation of poverty and overpopulation, Stopes sought as well to relieve women of the physical strain and risks of excessive childbearing. Her Married Love was followed by Wise Parenthood (1918), and in 1922 Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.

The population explosion

In 1790 a Venetian monk, Gianmaria Ortis, concluded that human population growth could not continue indefinitely. Malthus’ work a few years later stimulated more discussion and also provided the intellectual clue that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution through the survival of the fittest. The debate about human numbers remained academic, however, until the 1950s, when a surge in population occurred as a result of the comparative peace and prosperity following World War II.

In Malthus’ time world population was under 1,000,000,000, and when Sanger and Stopes opened the first birth control clinics population was still less than 2,000,000,000. In 1960 global population surpassed 3,000,000,000, and the next 1,000,000,000 was added in a mere 15 years. In the 19th century the population of industrialized nations rarely grew by more than 1 percent per annum, but in the 1960s and ’70s many developing countries exploded at a rate of 2 to 3 percent per year.

Rapid population growth has several economic consequences. It requires heavier investment in education, health, and transport merely to maintain these services at their previous level; yet, the working population has a higher burden of dependence to support, making both individual and national saving more difficult. Although population growth is not the only problem dividing rich and poor countries, it is one important variable that has widened the gap in growth in per capita income between developed and developing nations. Advocates of birth control see it as a means to prevent the personal and social pressures that result from rapid population growth.

Birth Control And Health

There is a marked relationship between patterns of reproduction and the risk of death to the mother and her child. Maternal deaths and infant mortality are up to 60 percent higher among girls under 15 than among women who have a child in their early 20s. The risk of death to the mother and her child rises again in the second half of the 30s. Maternal and infant mortality is lowest for the second and third deliveries. The risk of certain congenital abnormalities, such as Down’s syndrome (mongolism), is also greater in older women. Therefore, patterns of sexual abstinence and birth control, which concentrate childbearing in the age group 20–35 and limit family size to two or three children, have a direct impact on public health.

At the same time, it must be recognized that patterns of human reproduction have been finely tuned over millions of years of evolution and the postponement of childbearing until the later 20s or 30s also increases the risk of certain diseases. In particular, cancer of the breast is more common in women who postpone the first birth until the later 20s or older. In the Western world, the risk of death to women in childbirth is approximately one in 10,000, but in developing countries, where half the children born are delivered by traditional birth attendants, it is often 10 times as high. As the number of births worldwide rises, a greater number of women are likely to die having children. Simple access to birth control may be expected to reduce high death rates.

  Page 1 of 3 NEXT PAGEMethods of birth control   MORE ABOUT birth control 19 REFERENCES FOUND IN BRITANNICA ARTICLES Assorted Reference
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  • Asian countries (in Asia (continent): Contemporary trends)
  • China (in China: Population growth) (in one-child policy: Establishment and implementation)
  • Christian churches (in Christianity: The tendency toward asceticism)
  • Islam (in population (biology and anthropology): Population theories in antiquity)
  • Paul VI (in Blessed Paul VI: Vatican II and Paul VI’s pontificate)
  • Pius XII (in Pius XII: After World War II)
  • Roman Catholic Church (in Roman Catholicism: The family)
  • United States (in Griswold v. State of Connecticut)
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  • WebMD - Birth Control and Depo-Provera
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  • eMedicineHealth - Birth Control
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Articles from Britannica encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.

birth control - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Any method of avoiding or postponing pregnancy is called birth control. Much difference of opinion exists about the morality of preventing conception, especially by means other than sexual abstinence. Some religions maintain that birth control goes against God’s laws. Those who favor birth control argue that limiting family size, delaying family commitments, or not having children at all may be necessary for a better life. Issues of maternal health, maternal age, and genetic disorders are serious concerns. Increases in world population that threaten the supply of natural resources are also of concern to many.

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