Family planning services
National family planning movements have emphasized the right of the individual to determine family size as well as the contribution family planning can make to national and global population problems. Some methods of birth control, such as coitus interruptus and, in extreme cases, abortion, may involve no person other than the individual or couple. But most methods require manufacture, distribution, promotion, counselling, and in some cases financial subsidy.
The retail trade in contraceptives has been a major element in the spread of contraception and remains important in the developing world. In particular, social marketing programs, which adjust prices to people’s needs, have allowed governments to make contraceptives available to large numbers of people quickly and at affordable cost. Private doctors may advise patients about the use of birth control on a confidential basis and may charge a fee.
The first altruistic attempts to offer direct family planning services began with private, pioneering groups and often aroused strong opposition. The work of Sanger and Stopes reached only a small fraction of the millions of couples who in the 1920s and ’30s lived in a world irrevocably altered by World War I, crushed by economic depression, and striving for the then lowest birth rates in history. In 1921 Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1942 became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In Britain the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics was to evolve into the Family Planning Association. As early as 1881 the British Malthusian League had brought together individuals from 40 nations to discuss birth control, and five genuinely international meetings had taken place by 1930. A conference was held in Sweden in 1946. The first birth control clinic in India opened in 1930, and in 1952 in Bombay, Margaret Sanger took the first steps toward creating what became the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
The modern era in international family planning opened in the second half of the 1960s when governments, beginning with Sweden, gave money to support the worldwide work of the IPPF. William Draper lobbied with particular effectiveness in the United States to build up the IPPF and to put together the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), established in 1969. For several years the U.S. Agency for International Development helped to support the IPPF and the UNFPA. The United Nations held international conferences on population in Bucharest in 1974 and Mexico City in 1984.