Crankshaft

World Survey of Birth Control Practices Part 2

2011-01-07T23:44:00.001-08:00

Myanmar Myanmar (formerly Burma) lies between the Tibetan plateau and the Malay peninsula, bordering India, China, and Thailand. The largely Buddhist population is Literate, and 60 percent have access to health care. There are problems with pollution and with clean water. Myanmar Maternal and Child Welfare Association is one group that offers services to the public. It has special education

World Survey of Birth Control Practices Part 3

2011-01-07T23:44:00.000-08:00

Turkmenistan Turkmenistan borders the Caspian Sea, lying between Kazakstan and Iran. Flat to rolling sand in the north rising to mountains in the south means it has meadows and pastures but little arable land, and the land is polluted with chemicals. It is an important world producer of cotton. The promise of its immense petroleum reserves has not been fulfilled because of a tribal social

Women and the Control of Reproduction (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:43:00.002-08:00

Birth control has been part of the folklore and folk culture of nearly all societies. It has primarily been a woman's issue, and not one with which men were often much concerned. Since much of the knowledge of women never reached the printed page, it was passed on through the generations by what might be called an underground of midwives, wise women, and healers. Most of the herbal remedies

Yarros, Rachelle Slobodinsky (1869-1964) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:43:00.001-08:00

Rachel Slobodinsky was the first woman admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston in 1890 but she finished her education at Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, receiving the M.D. degree in 1893. She married Victor S. Yarros, like her a Russian immigrant, and the couple moved to Chicago, where RachelleYarros began an obstetrical and gynecological practice. She became an

World Survey of Birth Control Practices Part 1

2011-01-07T23:43:00.000-08:00

Most of the information for this survey is compiled from the web site of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) at . Some of the information is also dependent on data from the United Nations Population Information Network. Data are believed to be accurate to 1998 except where noted.The World Factbook 1997-1998 filled in information for

Witchcraft, Contraception, and Abortion (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

Fear of witches and witchcraft reached epidemic proportions at the beginning of the early modern period in Europe. Though the fear of witches had existed in the later Middle Ages, the greater fear in medieval times had been of heresy. Although heresy remained a major problem for the Catholic Church, it was the fifteenth century rise of neo-Platonism with its acceptance of a magical world view

Violence against Abortion Providers (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:41:00.001-08:00

Barnett Slepian, M.D., Buffalo, New York, obstetrician, gynecologist, and abortion provider, was assassinated in his Amherst, New York, home on October 23, 1998. Slepian, fifty-two, had returned from a synagogue service honoring his late father, and was relaxing in his kitchen with his wife and four sons, when a sniper's round smashed through a kitchen window and struck him in the back. The

Voluntary Parenthood League (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:41:00.000-08:00

The Voluntary Parenthood League (VPL) was founded in 1919 by Mary Ware Dennett after her resignation from the National Birth Control League. In many ways the VPL served as the organizational base for Dennett's ideas on birth control, despite that others often held more prestigious titles. With the VPL, the focus on removing birth control from obscenity statutes was at the federal level. The VPL

United States v. One Package (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:40:00.001-08:00

Even after the death of Anthony Comstock and the growing acceptance of birth control, the Comstock legislation, prohibiting importation of contraceptive devices or the sending of them through the mails.Margaret Sanger had been impressed by a new pessary designed by a Japanese physician whom she had met at a conference on contraceptive technique that she had organized in Zurich in 1930. This was

Vaginal Rings (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

The vaginal ring relies upon the sustained release of hormones, either progestin alone or in combination with estrogen, and they act on the reproductive system in the same ways as the oral contraceptives do. The only advantage they have over the pill, injections, or intrauterine devices (IUDs) is the ease with which the patient can place the ring and remove it. The disadvantage is that the

Stone, Hannah (1893-1941) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:39:00.001-08:00

Hannah Stone, a physician, became medical director of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in 1925. Stone, who had a staff affiliation with Lying-in Hospital, was forced by that institution to resign her affiliation as a result of her appointment and she was also denied membership in the New York County Medical Society for many years. One of her early accomplishments was to publish the

Stopes, Marie Charlotte Carmichael (1880-1958) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:39:00.000-08:00

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes differs from most of the other advocates of birth control in that she made sexuality very much part of her mission. Her 1918 publication, Married Love, became a manifesto for woman's rights to sexual enjoyment and sold more than a million copies. After this was published, she moved into the birth control movement. Marie Stopes, an enthusiastic advocate of

Social Purity Movement (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:38:00.004-08:00

The underlying philosophy behind most of the opposition to both contraception and abortion was that promulgated by the social purity movement. The deep ambivalence that Americans felt toward the growing industrialization, the vast increase in emigrants, the rapid growth of cities, the commercialization of contraception, the increase in prostitution, and a number of similar issues led to what

Spermicides (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:38:00.003-08:00

Spermicides, as indicated by the various historical entries in this topic, are among the oldest and simplest of all techniques used to prevent conception. From ancient times to the present, various substances, usually highly acidic ones with pasty or sticky bases, have been employed. The sticky base plus an acid remain important elements in current spermicides. The historical efforts are

Sponges, Tampons, and Vaginal Inserts (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:38:00.002-08:00

One of the early references to the insertion of a spongy substance into the vagina is in the Babylonian Talmud, a topic of Jewish tradition supplementing the Scriptures and written over a period of several centuries, being finally completed in the fifth century of the modern era. Some of the writers mention a mokh, a spongy substance made of absorbent material, something like wads of cotton that

Sterile Period (Rhythm Method) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:38:00.001-08:00

That intercourse during some phases of the female menstrual cycle was more likely to lead to pregnancy than during other times has long been recognized, although for much of history there was not much agreement on when these periods of sterility occurred. Neither the understanding of how reproduction occurred nor the physiology involved was advanced enough to give definitive answers. Existence of

Sterilization (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:38:00.000-08:00

The simplest form of male sterilization, castration, is an old practice and probably began with animals. Because most domestic animals tend to flock together and produce roughly the same number of male and female offspring, and one male was all that was actually needed to service dozens of females, castration to early herders served to be the ideal solution to the fighting and competition that

Sanger, Margaret Louise (Higgins) (1879-1966) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:37:00.002-08:00

Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York, to Irish-born Michael Higgins, a freethinker and stonemason, and his Irish-American wife, Anne Purcell Higgins, a devout Roman Catholic. Margaret Louise, the sixth of the eleven Higgins children, sought a way out of the working-class fate of her parents, and with the support of her two older sisters, attended Clav-erack College and Hudson River

Self-help Literature in the Nineteenth Century (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:37:00.001-08:00

The United States saw a wide dissemination of popular literature dealing with various medical problems including marriage and family ones in the nineteenth century. Much of it was written by unorthodox medical practitioners who appeared in great numbers. The more traditionally trained physicians founded the American Medical Association in 1846 to assert professional standards for medicine, but it

Serena (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

Serena, or Service de regulation desnaissances, an organization in French-speaking Canada, grew out of a movement begun in 1955 by Gilles and Rita Breault of Lachine, Quebec. Aided by a grant from their provincial government, teams of lay Catholics were trained to teach the techniques for using the "sterile" period to prevent conception. It was an early grass-roots movement in Quebec that taught

Protestantism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:32:00.003-08:00

The Protestant movement, which began in the sixteenth century, was not simply a theological movement, but rather one deeply associated with the political, economic, and social issues of the time. Many of the leaders who accepted Lutheran or Calvinist teachings did so in part out of desires to end the economic and political power of the papacy in their territories, or, in Germany, to oppose the

Quickening (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:32:00.002-08:00

Quickening was believed to be the time the soul entered the body—the time when human life began. But when did this occur? One of the issues in any discussion of abortion or child-bearing is that of when life begins. Neither ancient nor medieval people believed that the soul originated with conception. A male con-ceptus was not an ensouled being according to Hippocrates until after thirty days;

Robinson, William Josephus (1867-1936) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:32:00.001-08:00

William Josephus Robinson, M.D., was the first American physician to demand that contraceptive knowledge be taught to medical students and was a strong fighter against moral reformer Anthony Comstock. Robinson was probably the most influential and popular of the American physicians writing on birth control in the first three decades of the twentieth century, carrying on the work begun by Edward

RU 486 (Mifepristone) (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:32:00.000-08:00

Abortion became an increasingly divisive struggle in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. A symbol of this struggle was the battle over RU 486 (mifepristone), which had less to do with the pill itself than the politics of abortion. The compound was isolated by a team led by Etienne-Emile Baulieu at the French pharmaceutical company Roussell Uclaf in 1980. RU 486 (the test number

Population Control and Organization (birth control)

2011-01-07T23:31:00.001-08:00

Population control has had at least two different meanings. Generically, it has been the attempt in modern history to lower birthrates on national or regional scales, for the purpose of improving the standards of living of large groups. Specifically, it is the programs and policies advanced primarily by the United States, sometimes through international organizations such as the United Nations,