By Donna P. Hall
American women, like those in other industrialized countries, take our family planning for granted. But we shouldn’t. It’s only been 40 years since family planning was recognized as an international human right.
It was May 13, 1968, that the International Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran, declared that “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.”
It is an understatement to say that for women worldwide, this was a revolutionary declaration. For millennia, women were valued almost exclusively as mothers — while family planning was illegal. But women have sought means of limiting their mothering at least since Cleopatra tried using gold pellets. Women have always known that family planning gives them options — time to mature, to get an education or hold a job, or to recover from previous pregnancies.
Women also know that motherhood, though beautiful, is dangerous. More than 40 percent of all pregnancies suffer complications, and in 15 percent of pregnancies the complications are life-threatening. Infection, hemorrhage, high blood pressure (eclampsia), and obstructed labor, were routine killers of women worldwide, rich and poor alike, until the western medical advances of the 20th century. The Taj Mahal is a bereaved emperor’s monument to the wife who died at the age of 39 giving birth to his 14th child. In 1900, death in childbirth was still common, but women around the world bore an average of six children each.
The arrival of the intra-uterine device and the birth control pill in 1960 began the era of safe, affordable and effective contraceptives, and pressure from the post World War II generation of educated women gradually led to its legalization around the world.