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      As a note, McLaren's treatment of the history of contraception is much different from Riddle's treatment of the same topic. Riddle emphasizes the medical techniques (potions, herbs, spells, incantations, surgical techniques) which were used for contraception and the demographical evidence for the use of contraception while McLaren emphasizes the legal and cultural aspects of contraception.

1.       "In Crete homosexuality was, according to Aristotle, officially supported as a population control tactic." p. 13

2.       "Late age of marriage was eventually to become a major means by which Europeans maintained a fertility equilibrium." p. 15

3.       "Adoption was common in the ancient world, but those adopted were usually adults; the purpose was not to provide for the poor, but rather to obtain a suitable claimant to protect the family's property. As one's own children were often a disappointment adoption was, asserted the over-rational Democritus (c. 400 BC), the most reasonable way in which to assure oneself of worthy inheritors." p. 16-17

4.       Regarding fertility control in ancient Greece:

         "Most of these contraceptive practices referred to stratagems employed by women; this was clearly "female knowledge" of which male writers were often simply the chronicles. . . .

         Women naturally preferred to control fertility by some form or contraception because recourse to abortion put them at risk." p. 28

5.       "The general view of the ancient world was that a fetus was never more than potentially human. Stoics reflected this common sentiment in regarding it as a part of the mother until its birth. Abortion therefore presented an easier moral problem for the ancients than today inasmuch as they simply assumed that life was not present until parturition. Indeed, unmarried daughters were expected to seek abortion in order to save themselves and their fathers dishonour; the law of Solon, according to Plutarch, allowed the father to sell his dishonoured daughter into slavery. Married women were supposed to obtain the permission of their husbands before aborting, it only being considered 'wrong' if carried out counter to his wishes." p. 31-32

6.       Regarding fertility control in ancient Rome:

         "If the Roman couple's first concern was to have children, their second was not to have too many. Though children were commonly expected to follow marriage, the Roman elite did not relish the prospect of their urbanized, civilized style of life being jeopardized by a hoard of infants. The custom that required the equal division of the estate among one's children was the main reason usually advanced to explain why Roman families were so small. Even the intermittent attempts of the state to encourage population growth proved futile." p. 50

7.       "The man was primarily interested in the number of children among whom his estate would be divided; the woman was as concerned with when children were born as with how many she had. Her health depended on it." pp. 54-55

8.       "There was no particular sexual practice or activity - not masturbation nor abortion nor homosexuality - that especially aroused the concerns of Romans; rather it was the idea of 'excess' that preoccupied them. This concern for a victory over the powers of the flesh preceded Christianity and should not be confused with it; the goal was hygiene, not holiness. Christians and pagans appeared to say much the same thin -- especially about non-procreative sexuality -- but for distinctly different reasons." p. 65

9.       Regarding fertility control in the Christian West:

         "The historian attempting to investigate the relationship of changing family forms and fertility restrictions in Greek and Roman times finds the apparent silence of women a major problem. But when one turns to the Christian era an additional barrier is encountered. The sources no longer provide simple descriptions of family limitation method; such acts were now only noted in order to be ferociously condemned. Is it reasonable to hope that such a prescriptive literature, generated increasingly by celibate churchmen and often clearly formulaic in nature, could tell us anything about actual practices? If stop signs imply the existence of traffic, the clergy's on-going condemnations of abortion and contraception can at the very least be taken as evidence of the continued employment of such practices." p. 73

10.       "In Roman law the fetus was referred to, not as homo (human being) or infans (child), but as spes animantis (that which has hopes of living or being ensouled). Until its birth it was considered part of the mother and warranted no special considerations." p. 82

11.       "What was the relevance of the Christian discussion of fertility control to the status of women? It was once thought that the church held a special appeal for the oppressed, in particular slaves and women. In fact it clearly directed its attention at converting the urban male elite. Moreover, the most ascetic church fathers viewed women with fear and loathing; their greater concern was to shield young men from their seductions. The celebration of celibacy was accompanied by a denigration of women's reproductive power. The misogyny of even moderate Christians was quite striking. 'If it is not to generate children that the woman was given to the man as a helpmate', asked Augustine, 'in what could she be a help for him?'

          But the early church fathers were often ambivalent in their attitudes towards women. Jerome and John Chrysostom described the evil nature of females in general, but some of their best friends were women. In the early years of persecution, Christian scholars such as Tertullian and Clement made special appeals to them. Women for their part seemed to ignore the misogyny in Christianity and root out arguments in the scriptures that could be used to defy husbands and fathers.

          What was there in the Christian message that could appeal to women? The Christian defense of the celibate, contemplative life, which clearly had a powerful spiritual appeal, presented the option of avoiding marriage and childbearing altogether. Women who were attracted to such a life were not motivated by mere masochism. A genuine desire to overcome and redefine sex roles can be detected in such a choice. Marriage and the bearing of children had traditionally been policed by men to serve their purposes. Now women at least had a legitimate alternative.

          What of the married? The Christian condemnations of infanticide and exposure would presumably have resulted in fewer mothers having to envisage the sacrifice of their infants. Similarly, the church's attack on the institutions what supported the sexual double standard - prostitution, slavery, adultery, divorce - may have served women's interests. The ancient world have been primarily a monogamous society, but forms of polygamy had been tolerated for the purpose of providing heirs. Christians 'radicalized' monogamy in condemning concubinage and divorce. " pp. 87-88

12.       "It was obviously more than coincidental that the control of fertility had been openly discussed in the Hellenic period and the early empire when women enjoyed a good deal of freedom. They had some access to education, assisted in various religious cults and actively participated in the arts and medicine. Many must have in turn been initially attracted to Christianity by its preaching of the equality of the sexes. But by AD 200 the church swung round to support social and political order. It emerged as a male-dominate, hierarchical institution calling increasingly conservative terms for women's return to their 'natural', silent and subordinate role. Only the Gnostic and Manichean heretics remained sensitive to women's concerns, allowing them to preach and prophesy. Ireanaeus (AD 120-200), Tertullian and Augustine charged that such heresies even went so far as to condone abortion and contraception. the most interesting aspect of such claims is not their truth or falsehood -- which cannot be established -- but their author's clear expectations of such a linkage of religious ideas and social practices.

          Though Christianity became the established religion, it is difficult to determine the effect of its condemnations of fertility control. If a decline in recourse to contraception and abortion occurred, it probably took place because the urbanized style of life in which large families were regarded as a burden was swept away. But though the economic reasons for the sort of dynastic Malthusianism practiced by the Romans disappeared, women's desire to continue to control their bodies was maintained. The church's censures make it clear that this 'womanly question' would not go away. Caesarius of Arles reported that Gallo-Roman women argued that they could take what potions they liked: 'The maintain that the poison which has been transmitted through their drinking is unconnected with them.' Jerome was equally unsuccessful in inculcating in Roman matrons his views on such evils. In response to his attacks on abortion he was shocked to hear them retort, 'All things are clean to the clean. The approval of my conscience is enough for me.' " pp. 94-95

13.       "Jack Goody has suggested that the Christian church played a key role in establishing a new European family form. The church recognized that by taking over control of marriage, it could undermine paganism: 'since religion was embedded in the domestic domain, conversion implied the control of family life.' But more was at stake. Goody claims that in condemning as sinful close marriage, concubinage, and adoption -- the traditional family strategies employed by the Romans to produce heirs, continue the family line and consolidate family property -- the church found a way of building up its own economic power base. With the old strategies of heirship blocked, many individuals had no choice but to cede their land to the local parish. Similar effects ere obtained when the church defended women's rights and testamentary freedom. Widows, whose rights to their dowers were supported but whose remarriages were blocked by priests, were also likely to leave their wealth to the church. In short, Goody suggests that the church had its own good reasons for opening up kinship and defending the autonomy of the nuclear family." pp. 104-105

14.       "Curiously enough this desire for children did not manifest itself in adoptions. For the ancients, rearing had been as important as bearing children, and adoption had been widely employed. As a result the concepts of maternity and paternity were diluted and diffused. Fostering and wet-nursing were criticized by the church, but it aggressively sought to end adoption and ultimately succeeded. Why? Because of fear of incest? Because adoption was associated with ancestor worship? Because fictive heirs were associated with plural marriages? All these concerns no doubt played a role, but Christians put the greatest stress on the notion that heirs were not as important as spiritual offspring. Godparents emerged as an increasingly important institution. Ironically, such attacks on adoption resulted in Christians' placing an unprecedented emphasis -- similar to that of the barbarians -- on the biological nature of procreation." p. 110 (It is interesting that McLaren does not link his idea of a few pages earlier regarding its financial motivation in regard to inheritance with its financial interest in regard to adoption. i.e., If someone left no heirs, the church got the money. So why wouldn't the church adamantly oppose adoption?)

15.       "Despite all the attempts to enforce female submissiveness and all the medical and magical methods employed to promote fertility, family size in the Middle Ages was modest. Economic constraints played a major role. The reality was that the men and women of the Middle Ages were living in an overwhelming rural society. Small farms meant that it was unlikely that there could be anything else but relatively small families. Their size was determined in main by late marriage. Since land was the pre-eminent source of wealth, sons usually had to wait for a father's death or retirement to gain the economic independence that would permit the establishment of a new household. Moreover, a large portion never married. For those who did marry, short life expectancy combined with late age of marriage resulted in unions lasting only about fifteen to seventeen years and consequently low reproductive capacity. In addition, the high infant mortality rate depleted the number of children born; in Sicily only 1.7 children survived per family, compared to over four in Quercy. Across Europe only about half of the population reached age twenty. Most households were small. In the Carolingian world the average household had two or three children in Provence and Champagne; three or four further north. In the England of the thirteenth century there were about five residents per household; in the early fifteenth century the number dipped to four.

          Many noble families proved to have real difficulty reproducing. The Carolingian line died out in 987, the Ottonian in 1002 and the Rudolphian of Burgundy in 1032. Because brotherly rivalries often proved the greatest threat to family harmony, attempts were made to have no more than one son. The Bosonids Bobo and Hugh each had only one legitimate son and then as a 'conscious choice' turned to concubines. As long as partible inheritance dominated -- as it did in most of Europe until the eleventh century -- propertied families which did not want to see their lands divided had an interest in limiting heirs. The emergence in the eleventh century of primogeniture, which allowed the passing on of the estate intact to the eldest son, eased such pressures.

          The relatively low numbers of children in the medieval family have been attributed primarily to late marriage and high infant mortality. But limitation of pregnancies could also have played a role. Leyser, in broaching the subject of the birthing careers of nobles in Ottonian Saxony, noted that it was striking 'that the children of the Ottonian rulers in the tenth century were born in quick succession to one another and that the child-bearing ceased altogether before the mother even reached the age of thirty.' " pp. 113-114

16.       "Abortion prior to ensoulment was certainly not considered by the church as homicide and would not be until 1917." p. 126

17.       "In the tenth century Regino of Prum had invented an Augustine text, Si aliquis, which held, 'If someone to satisfy his lust or in deliberate hated does something to a man or woman so that no children be born or him or her, or gives them to drink, so that he cannot generate or she conceive, let it be held as homicide.' Si aliquis emerged from the penitentials, was used by confessors and was included in papal decretals in 1230." p. 129

18.       "According to Noonan, the Catholic church's renewed denunciations of contraception were due to two concerns: first, its traditionally hostility to sensuality, which was reinvigorated in the high Middle Ages by a rebirth of Augustinianism, and second, the need to respond to a new twelfth-century heresy perceived as opposed to procreation -- Catharism." p . 129

19.       "Throughout the Middle Ages the church was more concerned with the pleasure that resulted from unnatural acts than their contraceptive effect. Peter Ableard was the only scholastic to deny the idea of the intrinsic sinfulness of sexuality. For others, because of what they took to be the innate dangers of intercourse, excesses in the forms of undue passion, unnatural positions and number of couplings were all condemned. But contraception per se, as Brundage points out. was viewed as a minor moral problem. It was certainly not subjected, as sodomy was from the thirteenth century, to savage punishments. The church's condemnation of fertility control was simply part of its general campaign to remake marriage, and is best understood in the context of the growth of marriage liturgy, the expansion of the confessional as an instrument for the closer policing of morals, and the attempted imposition of Christian codes on those still largely true to older sexual customs." p. 130

20.       Regarding fertility control in the Early Modern Europe:

          "The medieval injunction, 'no land, no marriage', was still largely honoured, though less so from he sixteenth century onward. Up to 20% of the population remained single for life." p. 141

21.       "The average marriage age of English peers rose between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries from twenty-five to thirty for men and from twenty to twenty-four for women. Across north-western Europe, males married at twenty-nine to thirty and females at twenty-five to twenty-six. On the continent, the austere doctrine of late marriage and pre-conjugal chastity preached by counter-reformation priests complemented the concern of the laity that marriages were economically secured.

          The betrothal continued to be the vital step in laying the basis for a marriage which united not only two individuals, but two families; sexual intercourse frequently preceded the actual wedding. Something like a quarter of brides went to the altar pregnant, yet the fact that illegitimacy rates represented only about 2 per cent of births suggests the seriousness with which childbearing was taken. Whether such caution was due to an internalization of Christian ethics or a fear of social ostracism made little difference. Sexual self-control was clearly an ingrained form of rational behavior." p. 142

22.       "Christianity propagated the idea that the child was sent by God and, unlike other religions, made few concessions to the social realities that justified the avoidance of pregnancy. If one had too many children it had to be viewed as a cross to bear. This doctrine did produce curious twist, condemning, for example, male masturbation as a sort of homicide, but defending female masturbation if employed for the purpose of completing intercourse by producing the necessary seed." pp. 148-149

23.       "The invention of the condom expanded, however modestly, men's power over procreation." p. 158

24.       "In 1557, Henri II declared that any concealed pregnancy that ended with the death of the child would be presumed to be murder. A similar statue was passed in England in 1624." p. 159

25.       "Historians of the family always run the risk of mistaking doctrines and practices. A 'love' marriage at the start of the eighteenth century was construed as an unfortunate misalliance; by its end parents were insisting that their children marry for 'love.' The vocabulary had changed; not the concerns of the parents to make a good match." p. 169

26.       "In the nineteenth century, America and western Europe entered a new demographic age. These societies had never produced the maximum number of children biologically possible, but fertility rates were from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century relatively stable; suddenly in the mid-1800s a sustained decline in fertility began. By World War I, family size was cut in half. the extensive use of contraception was signaled not so much by the drop in number of large families -- which might have been explained by lengthy periods of continence and extended nursing -- as by the increasingly early age at which women stopped giving birth.

          Western women traditionally began their birthing careers rather late and widely spaced their pregnancies, but in eighteenth-century France the widespread employment of birth control was aimed at reducing family size. By 1830 the country's birth rate dropped below thirty per thousand, and the term 'French family' was henceforth discretely employed by the English when referring to the two-child household. The United States, which in the eighteenth century had experiences a fertility higher than that of Europe, also saw its rate being to decline steadily from the first decades of the nineteenth century, dropping by 50 per cent between 1800 and 1900. The lead was taken in the north-east; in Utica, New York, for example, native-born middle-class women who had begun their childbearing in the 1820s had on average 5.8 children; those who began ten years later had only 3.6 children.

          Until the 1870s, most European nations maintained much higher levels of fertility. What demographers call the 'demographic transition' was the dramatic drop in such rates that occurred between 1870 and 1920." pp. 178-179

27.       "In France, limitation of family size was attributed from the eighteenth century on to the peasantry's intent to avoid diving land between heirs and the bourgeoisie's efforts to maintain a civilize life style. . . .

          The fact that the well-to-do led the abandonment of large families has been advanced as proof by Banks and others that the adoption of birth control was a cultural innovation." p. 180

28.       "Condorcet, one of the few philosophes who could be considered a feminist, suggested that to avoid misery artificial means be employed to constrain population." p. 181

29.       Regarding nineteenth century America:

          "There was no hard statistical evidence available on the number of abortions, but doctors asserted that up to a quarter of all conceptions were terminated." p. 191

30.       "There was no important technological breakthrough which explained the widespread decline of fertility in the later nineteenth century. The available methods required a sacrifice of pleasure (condoms, coitus interruptus, extended lactation and continence) or posed real danger (abortion). The fact that such means could be exploited successfully indicates the determination with which couples employed them. But the causes of such determination varied according to class and sex." p. 192

31.       "Women in the social purity camp did oppose contraception as simply offering another means by which women could be subordinated to men. "Voluntary motherhood' was defended by Protestant women, who at the same time feared that male forms of contraception, associated as they were with prostitution, would increase immorality. " p. 195

32.       "Thus in Germany Helene Stocker and Marie Stritt, and in France Madeleine Pelletier, called for the use of contraceptives and the legalization of abortion." p. 197

33.       "Such was the association of birth control with 'advanced women' that the first generation of women doctors found that both their colleagues and patients assumed they would provide advice on abortion and contraception." p. 198

34.       "The various socialist parties were opposed to neo-Malthusian economic theories, but divided over the wisdom of defending the workers' right to birth-control information. Nevertheless, workers ultimately restricted family size, not in order to ape the behavior of the upper classes, bur largely because the wages of children and women, which in the early industrial society often added up to more than half of the family's income, were radically diminished as the economy matured." p. 199

35.       "The reality was that it would be the rare nineteenth-century, working-class woman who could hope to make this transition to full-time motherhood," p. 200

36.       "With the fall in the demand for agricultural and unskilled labour, the large family lost its economic rational." p. 200

37.       "As the cost of rearing children rose, their numbers in working-class households began to decline." p. 201

38.       "Having dwelt on the material concerns of labour, it is necessary to acknowledge that there is the danger, when discussing the decline of both middle- and working-class fertility, of attributing everything to economic calculation. The concept of couple's pursuing fertility 'strategies' is a seductive notion, but can give the unwarranted impression that every birth was determined. Clearly, every pregnancy faced by a working-class woman was not planned." p. 201

39.       "If the fertility rate had been simply dictated by economic forces it could have been expected to oscillate, going up in good times and down in bad. But once the birth rate started to come down it never returned to its old level; it is difficult not to believe that women played an important role in such decision making. Once women knew they did not have to become pregnant, they viewed childbirth in a radically new way. The stoicism they often assumed when facing pregnancy was replaced with fears and concerns, despite the fact that the actual number of births they faced was declining. Giving birth did not, of course, suddenly cease to be so dangerous; that would not be true until the 1940s, when sulpha drugs became available to counter post-delivery infections. But the increased ability to avoid pregnancies and their resulting complications made women more, not less, determined to avoid them.

          Carl Degler has attributed the rise of birth control to nineteenth-century women's growing sense of individualism. No doubt it did play a role. Individualism was fostered by literacy; those who could read had a greater expectation of controlling their own destiny. And the literacy of women made the great difference; studies of nineteenth-century America revealed that literate wives had a lower fertility than illiterate wives married to men of the same class. Officially the neo-Malthusian line stressed individual decision making. But working-class women put greater stress on reciprocity, community, neighborhood assistance and mutuality. They took a pragmatic, unromantic view of marriage, taking domestic disputes in their stride and accepting the fact that the primary source of personal fulfillment would not be necessarily found in their spouse. Other women - mothers, sisters, friends -- provided emotional support. Contraceptive information accordingly spread via such networks. Population density was often correlated to fertility control, no doubt because a concentration of women allowed a passing on of advice. And the rapid diffusion of the low fertility ideal was, moreover, possibly due to the fact that female culture was less divided than male. In the dissemination of birth-control information, old sociability networks were turned to fresh purposed and new ones created." p. 202

40.       "A Berlin working woman, asked how she avoided pregnancies, answered, "My husband always takes care of himself." How? "I don't know. We never talk about that. He only says that now nothing more can happen." "p. 204

41.       "At the turn of the century it was commonly assumed that the decline of family size represented women's attempt to free themselves of their traditional duties. The reality was more complex. Existing gender roles ere in many ways strengthened rather than weakened. Indeed, a new patriarchy emerged as working-class husbands became sole breadwinners and working-class wives were left increasingly relegated to the home. The social price paid by the unwed mother was greater than it had been in the pre-industrial world, and the single necessarily reassessed the pleasures and dangers of sex." p. 205

42.       "In point of fact, the French birth rate was the lowest in the world in the interwar period. This despite the fact that there was no organized birth-control movement and every political party presented itself as pro-natalist." p. 214

43.       "But curiously, both the birth-control advocates and the medical professionals to whom the dramatic advances in fertility control have been usually attributed opposed many of the traditional means employed -- including those envied by the Italians -- as ineffective and dangerous." p. 205

44.       "Sanger later dated her conversion to birth control not to the time of her contact if [Emma] Goldman, whom she came to see as a rival, but to a 1913 trip to France, where she was amazed at the sexual sophistication of ordinary mothers." p. 216

45.       "Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was raised in an enlightened upper-middle-class family. She was the first Englishwoman to receive a doctorate in palaeobotany, but was not unhappy that many assumed "Dr. Stopes" was a physician." p. 207

46.       "Stopes and Sanger shared many of the same concerns. They both were alarmed by the high maternal and infant mortality rates associated with large families, and exploited the eugenic concerns for the need to improve the 'quality' of the race. Knowing that the middle class already restricted births, they sought to make accessible to lower-class women the contraceptives limited as yet to the better off. They both stressed the need for clinics supported by the government and directed by trained personnel to educate the public in contraceptive use. But most important of all, they sought on the one hand to play down the old, pessimistic, economic arguments usually trotted out by the neo-Malthusians in favour of birth control and on the other to purge the movement of any associations with sexual or political radicalism. Stopes and Sanger believed that the challenge was to make limitation of family size appear not simply economically necessary but morally acceptable. To do this, they developed the positive arguments that contraception was not only compatible with pleasure but essential if the woman's passions were to be allowed full expression.

          But Stopes's and Sanger's message was not simply a hymn to marital bliss; they wedded it to a warning of the dire social consequences that could result from uncontrolled fertility. Their propagandizing activities were so successful that it is often forgotten that by the time they appeared on the scene, average family size in both American and Britain was only half of what it had been in the nineteenth century. Most working-class couples were already employing some means to attempt to limit pregnancies; Stopes and Sanger reflected the eugenic preoccupations of the age in their conviction that working-class fertility had to be much more rapidly diminished.

          Although there was considerable confusion as to the cause of the fertility decline, there was by 1914 general agreement amongst serious researchers that it was volitional, and not as some pessimists had declared a result of racial decay." p. 208

47.       "Stopes's social preoccupations were made clear in the Birth Control News, which was filled with columns on the racial and national necessity of birth control." p. 209

48.       "Surprisingly enough, the grassroots defenders of birth control tended to be American radicals or British Labour party supporters, who seemed able simply to ignore Stopes's and Sanger's ludicrously elitist outbursts." p. 220

49.       "The evidence collected at the birth-control clinics revealed that coitus interruptus was the main form of contraception employed by the mass of the population." p. 235

50.       "In the 1930s, the most popular methods used in Britain, were, in order, withdrawal, sheath, safe period and pessaries." p. 235

51.       "In England, as late as the 1970s, 'the Medical Defense Union advised practitioners not to fit an intra-uterine device for a woman without the consent of her husband.' "p. 237

52.       "Marriages that one lasted less than thirty years now could last at least forty-five. With longer life expectancy it became normal to see all of one's grandchildren born. Only in the 1970s did divorce 'compensate' for the decline in spousal deaths as a cause of family break-up. In the nineteenth-century, the single-parent family was due to widowhood; in the twentieth, it was due to divorce.

          Those who bemoaned the 'decline of the family' forgot that children in previous centuries had been sent out early in life into domestic service of apprenticeships and had married late in life. In the post-war world, they stayed in school and lived at home until their late teens and married in their early twenties." p. 243

53.       "By the 1980s, something like 90 per cent of married couples in most western countries were employing contraceptives. An international survey of contraceptive users found that 33 per cent had been sterilized, 20 per cent employed the oral contraceptive, 15 per cent the IUD and 10 per cent the condom. It needs to be stressed, however, how recent this shift to modern fertility-limitation methods is. In countries like France and Czechoslovakia, for example, withdrawal was still, until the arrival of the pill in the 1970s, the most widely employed means of birth control." p. 252

54.       "Today, the married, one they have achieved a desired family size, increasingly accept sterilization as the simplest and safest way to avoid pregnancy. Over a third of North American males eventually have a vasectomy. The percentage of couples who rely on sterilization for fertility control is, however, not really comparable to that using other methods which can be employed and abandoned; sterilization reversals have a 50 to 75 per cent success rate, but entail expensive medical procedures. Sterilization has other drawbacks, including its culturally perceived threat to virility. The fact that the vasectomy is a far safer and simpler operation than tubal litigation, but that in most countries the latter operation is more common, suggests women pay a high price for fertility control." p. 252- 253

55.       "The adoption of a family system in which large numbers of children are no longer culturally expected to provide wealth and social status had to precede the acceptance of modern contraception. Contraceptives can, is short, be most confidently predicted to work in a society where fertility rates are already dropping. But they can also undermine whatever success has already been gained by traditional fertility-control measures. For example, extended breast-feeding, which in the developing world is responsible for the avoidance of more pregnancies than any other birth-control method, can be threatened by hormonal contraceptives." pp. 253-254

56.       "Women are often blamed by conservative for high abortion rates. The truth is that women do not 'want' abortions; they need them." p.255

57.       "Because contraceptives are so widely accepted -- Catholics proving to be as likely to employ them as Protestants -- the Right has focused its attack on abortion. But as this study has argued, and as legal scholars now recognize, it is difficult in practice to draw a sharp line between fertility-control strategies. If abortion were outlawed, the IUD and the low-dose pill, which prevent the fertilized ovum from lodging in the uterus wall, logically would also have to be criminalized. . . . .

          The real importance of the popular campaigns being wage against reproductive choice in North American and Europe is that they focus attention on what society regards as women's appropriate social roles. As Kristin Luker has pointed out, much of the hostility to abortion comes from those who believe it a method by which middle-class, professional women violate traditional gender norms. Although Catholic priests and fundamentalist ministers provide the leadership of the 'pro-life' movement, full-time housewives who do not work outside the home and feel that their procreative labours are devalued by a society which blurs sex roles provide much of the campaign's grass-roots support. There is a logic in such women's thinking. Their family structure is based on a bargain between a husband who provides financial support and a wife who in return provides sex and child care. Easily accessible abortion and contraception, they fear, undercut the argument that a woman can only risk providing sexual favours if guaranteed the protection of a traditional marriage.

          The opponents of contraception and abortion have long argued that birth-control methods actually serve to incite promiscuity. Women will only remain chaste, they assert, if they have a good reason to fear becoming pregnant. " p. 256

58.       "Feminists particularly worry that the new medical technologies are shifting the attention of doctors from the mother to the fetus as patient." p. 258

59.       "In the 1920s, over 20 per cent of white United States women were childless at age forty; by the 1980s, the figure was down to 1 per cent. It may be no longer expected that a woman will have a large number of children, but an enormous amount of normative pressure is exerted by governments, churches and the popular culture on women to 'fulfill' themselves by having at least one child." pp. 260-261

60.       "Women traditionally gained a good deal of status from childbearing." p. 261

61.       Noted the books:

          Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals, The Perception of Fertility in England form the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Methuen, London, 1984)

    

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