Birth control

Pregnant women hold their medical cards and wait for their turn to be examined at a government hospital on World Population Day in Hyderabad, India, Friday, July 11, 2014. 

As India becomes the world’s most populous nation, engaging men in family planning ‘will be a game changer’

Reproductive rights

The United Nations projects that next year, India will surpass China and claim the title of the world’s most populous country. India’s population growth has actually been slowing down for many decades, thanks to comprehensive family planning — but the burden mostly falls on women.

A woman with a black and white striped shirt sits outside with younger children surrounding her.

Czech Republic may offer justice, compensation to thousands of sterilized Roma women 

Human rights
A woman speaks behind a table

Ugandan archbishop breaks with tradition to promote birth control during pandemic

COVID-19
women wearing colorful saris gather in a circle.

Rural women in India struggle to access contraception. These people are trying to change that.

Sexuality
An NGO health worker holds contraceptive pills

There’s still no birth control pill for men, despite promising candidates. Where’s the research headed?

Lifestyle
Sister Loraine McGuire with Little Sisters of the Poor speaks to the media after Zubik v. Burwell, an appeal brought by Christian groups demanding full exemption from the requirement to provide insurance covering contraception under the ACA.

TV news stories about birth control quote politicians and priests more often than medical experts

Health

Fewer than one-third of stories on the nightly news programs for ABC, CBS and NBC between January 2010 and July 2014 featured any medical information at all.

Sonia Narang Q&A_03

How Filipino moms endure a maternity ward that’s like ‘a blaring supermarket deli counter’

Health

Sonia Narang recently returned from reporting on reproductive rights in the Philippines for Across Women’s Lives. She visited Manila’s Fabella Hospital and shows us through her photography what it’s like for Filipino women to endure one of the world’s most crowded maternity wards.

CycleBeads are among the apps offering to help with "user-directed birth control."

Sex without the Pill? There’s an app for that!

Health

You might have thought of the “rhythm method” of family planning as discredited and low-tech. Not anymore. Fertility awareness mobile apps are reinventing the rhythm approach by adding precision and detail to calendar-based efforts to monitor a woman’s hormonal cycle.

eaton lead

‘God commanded’ family planning, says this Muslim leader in flood-ravaged Malawi

Environment

Into the 1990s, Malawi banned not only birth control, but sex education and even miniskirts. Now, attitudes toward contraception are changing under the pressure of climate change and rapid population growth.

sonia 3

How this clinic has changed a nation’s view of family planning

Health

Both women and men go to this health clinic, where both hear about IUDs and other methods of family planning in a nation with a large number of unintended pregnancies.