Atlas of Contraception PDF

Preface

Over the past two decades, family planning and reproductive health have become recognized as a medical specialty with professional organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and national and international meetings. It was not always so. There could not have been an atlas of this type in 1950, and even in 1980 it might have looked very different.

Family planning and reproductive health is a branch of preventive medicine that can have a profound impact on the health of women and their children. Like many other aspects of medicine, certain contraceptive choices require surgical or clinical skills in order to be used correctly. For some couples with chronic sickness or inheritable diseases, family planning advice is an intrinsic part of comprehensive patient care. Physicians have also taken a leadership role in family planning because they often see the acute suffering that occurs when people are denied family planning choices. At the same time, family planning differs from other branches of medicine in two critical ways: it is only successful when those concerned recognize that family planning involves consumer choices more than physician prescriptions and in most cases it deals with healthy people. It must be recognized that, although some contraceptives have been developed by medical researchers, the actual distribution of these methods, i.e. getting the right contraceptive to the right individual at the right place and right cost, involves many groups of service providers, the majority of them being non-clinical. The tension between consumer choices and conventional clinical perspectives is especially strong in the case of abortion. In putting this atlas together we have tried to keep these several perspectives in mind and, in order to better understand today's issues, we have also noted some of the history of family planning.

We are grateful to colleagues who have provided material and to the staff at Informa Healthcare for their patience and attention to detail. But above all we are grateful to the women and men all over the world who it has been our privilege to care for and who, in turn, have taught us the things we now know about this specialty. One thing we are certain about: family planning will continue to evolve and it will continue to remain important to hundreds of millions of people in all nations and of every background.