The Pill: A Perspective for Assessing Risks and Benefits

Abstract

In the last 17 years, the emergence of a new fertility-control technology, based primarily on the oral contraceptive, has led to increasingly effective regulation of reproduction. The principal characteristics of this technology are that the new methods are highly efficient in preventing conception and can be applied at a time unrelated to sexual intercourse. In the United States and other industrialized nations, this technology led to a "contraceptive revolution,"¹ and in developing countries, it made possible a historically unprecedented rate of adoption of medical contraception. The advent of the pill, followed a few years later by modern intrauterine devices (IUD's), . . .