Contraception: News of the Pill

"Reproduction," said Demographer Lincoln Day at a Yale University symposium for gynecologists, "is a private act, but it is not a private affair. It has far-reaching social consequences. No longer can we defend excessive reproduction by saying 'Well, they can afford it.' The question now is whether society can afford it." Not so, argued a gynecologist after listening to Day's talk. "How many children a couple want to have is their own business, and the point of birth control is just to ensure that freedom of choice."

The open debate, covered matter-of-factly by the press, was further proof of the worldwide turnabout in attitudes toward birth control since the advent of oral contraceptives (TIME cover, April 7). In the past few weeks, newspapers and magazines have been filled with news of family planning, population control and the pill.

The U.S. Government, for example, was supposed to have decided more than a year ago to spread the population-control message. In practice, it has spent a scant $9,000,000 in the past twelve months on family-planning leaflets and small-scale birth-control advice to countries that asked for it. Last week AID Administrator William S. Gaud told Congress that with its hoped-for $20 million budget in the next fiscal year, AID will at last begin to finance the manufacture and distribution of oral contraceptives in countries that have voluntary family-planning programs. Putting money where its mouth is, AID also announced approval of a $168,000 loan in rupees to G. D. Searle & Co. to set up a subsidiary in Pakistan to produce ten drugs, including two oral contraceptives.

"Potential Disaster." Much of last week's pill news from outside the U.S. came from the International Planned Parenthood Federation world conference in Chile. Reflecting the new international importance of population control, British Delegate to the U.N. Lord Caradon opened the Santiago meeting by declaring that it had convened out of "a sense of danger, indeed by a sense of potential disaster." At present rates of increase, averaging more than 2% a year, today's 3.3 billion world population will multiply to almost 7 billion by the year 2000.* Most alarming, continued Lord Caradon, is the fact that the increase is greatest in those areas of the world with the least capacity to feed growing numbers of people. It is not so bad in the U.S. (1.6% a year) and Western Europe (only about 1%), but it is ominous in Latin America, where population is increasing by 3% a year and possibly more. Population growth is surpassing economic growth, and with it the ability to feed more people. Said Caradon, with impeccable logic: "Production and reproduction must be tackled together."

The logic is beginning to take root. A favorite story going the rounds at the Planned Parenthood conference tells of a 27-year-old woman who had just returned to the Chilean capital after a few years abroad. At a reunion of her convent school class, she looked around at 30 classmates, nearly all of them married, and got a "What's wrong with this picture?" reaction. None of them were pregnant, though most of them had been pregnant at the previous reunion five years before. "It suddenly dawned on me," she said, "that they were all on the pill."