Category: Contraception
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Family planning and safe, legal abortion go hand in hand
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters One in three women in the UK will have an abortion in her lifetime, most of whom will have been using contraception of some kind. Yet since as long ago as the late 1930s, there has been a split in the UK between those who insisted on promoting contraception…
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The morning after: the beginnings of an assessment of the FP Summit
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters 13 July 2012 From a communications point of view, the FP Summit was a raving success. Newspapers, TV and radio all over the world covered it. Around the globe everyone reached by the media heard how wonderful family planning is and how neglected it has been, the Lancet launched…
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Making change happen is in the air
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters Below, are excerpts from my editorial in RHM 20(39) May 2012. This issue is about reducing maternal mortality, but the more I reflected on it the more I realised it had implications for this week’s summit on family planning. Making change happen is in the air, from the UN…
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All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant!
Marge Berer, Editor, Reproductive Health Matters I was among the first generation of women in the 1960s to experience the miracle of the pill just at the age when I was wanting to start having sex. All I had to do was take a pill every day, I was told, and hey presto, I didn’t…
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An unholy alliance: religion, neo-liberal economics and good old fashioned patriarchy – restricting women’s abortion rights in Eastern Europe
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A report from guest blogger Charlotte Gage on ‘How much does abortion cost?’ a session organised by ASTRA Central and Eastern European Women’s Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights at the AWID Forum in Istanbul. I attended this session where speakers from Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia outlined the economic dimension of sexual…
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Hormonal contraception and risk of HIV: new studies, the issues, and the response of the World Health Organization
Many feminists, including me, actively opposed the hormonal injectable contraceptive Depo Provera (DMPA) three decades ago ̶ it was at a time when certain women weren’t being given a choice of method or any information about possible side effects, and before long-term post-marketing studies began to be done to monitor long-term safety. Here in the…
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Jingle pills indeed
This post first appeared on the BMJ Group Blog, 12th December 2011 Many years ago now, when news of female sterilisation first came out, Catholic priests in Puerto Rico and other Catholic countries preached from their pulpits against women being sterilised. As a result many more women learned that sterilisation existed, and many went out…