conception and contraception calendar

(592 pages)

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race by: Edwin Black publisher: Basic Books released: 2004-09 ISBN: 1568583214 $18.00

This is one of the most thorough volumes on the topic of eugenics that have surfaced in years. "War Against the Weak," gives a no-holds-barred look at this revolting practice and how it started in America. It chronicles the rise and fall of the eugenic movement, how Darwinism was embraced due to its notion of natural "superiority" and current practices that hint at other forms of eugenics in the world.

This is a great starter book for those new to the topic as well as a full reference for those familiar with it.

As a child in grade school in the mid-40s I wondered why our principal (and his preacher friend) were always ranting about 'bad blood' and 'sins of the father' - Edwin Black's book, War Against The Weak, sheds great light on their attitudes and demonstrates how famous, well-intentioned people get sucked into evil notions such as Eugenics and other 'absolutes'. Ideas, no matter how bright and glittery, can lead down
ugly paths and take that evil fork in the road which leads to holocast.
This book should be required reading for every freshman college class.

This book lays out a case, in plain language, that diseased ideas can propogate like wildfire, particularly when powerful people get behind them. Adolf Hitler did not just wake up one day and decide that Jews, homosexuals and the mentally disabled should be killed. That idea had been alive, spreading and in fact exported to Europe by US. This may explain why ships of Jewish refugees were turned back from entrance to this country during the war, eventhough everyone knew they would likely face death. This explains why so many Nazi scientists were welcomed into this country to continue biological research after the war.
But mostly what this well-researched work shows is the importance for standing up for all people and not assuming that any one of us has the right to determine who is fit or unfit to exist.

This book single-handedly was responsible for opening my eyes to the eugenics movement, and I've been fascinated ever since. It's cited in many of my papers, excellent source, well researched, and an exciting read. Highly recommended!

This book seems to be a fairly complete overview of the subject. Its one recurring flaw is that the text sometimes reads as if the author believes that he is the first to notice the connections between American (and European) Eugenics and the Nazis. I doubt if the author intended that, but that is still the impression sometimes left.

This is a very readable book, and well-suited for undergraduate use.

(384 pages)

Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Gender and American Culture) by: Johanna Schoen publisher: The University of North Carolina Press released: 2005-02-16 ISBN: 0807855855 $17.96

In August 2003, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to offer restitution to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out by its eugenics program between 1929 and 1975. The decision was prompted by newspaper stories based on the research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to summaries of 7,500 case histories and the papers of the North Carolina Eugenics Board.

In this book, Schoen situates the state's reproductive politics in a national and global context. Widening her focus to include birth control, sterilization, and abortion policies across the nation, she demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Such programs overwhelmingly targeted poor and nonwhite populations, yet they also extended a measure of reproductive control to poor women that was previously out of reach.

On an international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example, tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home.

Drawing on the voices of health and science professionals, civic benefactors, and the women themselves, Schoen's study allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of American women.

(256 pages)

Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance by: John M. Riddle publisher: Harvard University Press released: 1994-04 ISBN: 0674168763 $22.95

John Riddle uncovers the obscure history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the seventeenth century with forays into Victorian England--a topic that until now has evaded the pens of able historians.

Riddle's thesis is, quite simply, that the ancient world did indeed possess effective (and safe) contraceptives and abortifacients. The author maintains that this rich body of knowledge about fertility control--widely held in the ancient world--was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages, becoming nearly extinct by the early modern period. The reasons for this he suggests, stemmed from changes in the organization of medicine. As university medical training became increasingly important, physicians' ties with folk traditions were broken. The study of birth control methods was just not part of the curriculum.

In an especially telling passage, Riddle reveals how Renaissance humanists were ill equipped to provide accurate translations of ancient texts concerning abortifacients due to their limited experience with women's ailments. Much of the knowledge about contraception belonged to an oral culture--a distinctively female-centered culture. From ancient times until the seventeenth century, women held a monopoly on birthing and the treatment of related matters; information passed from midwife to mother, from mother to daughter. Riddle reflects on the difficulty of finding traces of oral culture and the fact that the little existing evidence is drawn from male writers who knew that culture only from a distance. Nevertheless, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, the author pieces together the clues and evaluates the scientific merit of these ancient remedies in language that is easily understood by the general reader. His findings will be useful to anyone interested in learning whether it was possible for premodern people to regulate their reproduction without resorting to the extremities of dangerous surgical abortions, the killing of infants, or the denial of biological urges.

I would not read this if you are looking for abortion information. It is a history book, and it may poison you to use these recipes.

This is a fine reference book for botanists, pharmacists, academics, writers, and, I suppose, those who want to make the point that abortion and contraception have been around a long, long time. It is clearly written, if a little disorganized, and recipes are given, though the reader is well advised NOT TO TRY THIS AT HOME.

John Riddle provides a comprehensive and compelling examination of contraception and abortion through history. An excellent reference, and the only source that shows the historical underpinnings of the contraceptive and abortive agents we use today.

Fern Reiss (fernreiss@aol.com), author of "The Infertility Diet: Get Pregnant and Prevent Miscarriage"

Looking for information about birth control options is frustrating. This book tantalizes the reader with the possibilities but unfortunately, as the author points out, it is impossible to find real methods without trial and error, which is not an acceptable risk for most of us! It is fascinating to learn that birth control was possible even before vulcanized rubber and the pill, and there are possibilities out there that haven't been touched by the medical community. This book and its companion (Eve's Herbs) are well worth reading and I recommend them to anyone interested in not only family planning of the ancients' but also the history of the western world's attitude toward fertility, especially contraception and abortion. Physicians especially could learn a lot from this book.

(352 pages)

Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West by: John M. Riddle publisher: Harvard University Press released: 1999-04-15 ISBN: 0674270266 $24.00

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve's Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?

Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed "secret knowledge" to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.

Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as "witchcraft" in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by "Eve's herbs" has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

If you are looking for do-it-yourself abortion information like I was, this is not a good book for that. It is a history book. It's good, but not an abortionary (abortion dictionary).

As a person who enjoys the study of social history (how people lived) and herbal medicine, this book exceeded my expectations on both counts.

Riddle is an historian, so the scholarship in the book is historical scholarship. He moves deftly between conflicting theories of demographics and actual family sizes, at home with his contemporaries and able to argue his somewhat novel opinion on a level playing field. Not surprisingly, historians tend to go along with modern medical thought that there were no effective systems of personal or professional health care prior to our own allopathic tradition in the past few centuries. Herbalists, homeopaths and the like are still fighting for legitimacy against exactly this mindset.

What surprised and delighted me was the thoroughness of Riddle's information on the herbs in question. It must be noted that he does NOT provide recipes for readers to use at home. He isn't playing (herbal) doctor. Regardless, a person with some experience in herbalism or access to alternate texts can easily take the list of herbs from this book and find appropriate dosage and other how to information from that other source--including the important caveat that herbs are not always safe and shouldn't be taken without professional advice or lots of research. Riddle's emphasis is on pointing out which plants have been indicated, by whom in the ancient world, and what science has (or has not) done to test for actual efficacy.

One interesting side note for readers who allow for the possible effectiveness of today's most revolutionary complementary medicine modalities is Riddle's reporting of the fact that, historically, chants (magic) were often listed together with the herbs (medicine) in any given herbal recipe. Riddle is careful and respectful of the potential for narrow-mindedness when he admits that, to our Western minds, there can be no believing in the usefulness of the magic side of the equation, but he makes no disparaging remarks and he allows for future scientific work to prove said "magic" effective. Of course, to a modern practitioner of Reiki or any other mental/spiritual healing system, it is certainly possible to suppose the intent of the healer and/or patient was a necessary or beneficent part of the ancient cures.

I expected to enjoy this book's subject matter, but I was actually delighted by how well Mr. Riddle covered both aspects of the topic, and even more so by the easy readability of his style. Any person who enjoys reading well-written history for pleasure will find this a work worth spending some time with.

The best book out there thus far on herbal contraception and abortion.

An outstanding work of scholarship. Riddle has gathered buried historical evidence of reproductive control through the ages. A must read for those who feel that we live in the most "enlightened" age, in regards to reproduction. Riddle will prove you wrong. Women have been in control of their reproduction for centuries. Readily available herbs have been more effective than "modern science" throughout society.

(264 pages)

Running After Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe (Social History of Africa Series) by: Amy Kaler publisher: Heinemann released: 2003-12-22 ISBN: 0325070431 $27.95

Kaler examines how "modern" contraceptive technologies, such as the pill and the Deop-Provera injection, were embroiled in gender and generation conflicts, and in the national liberation struggle, in Zimbabwe during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extensive oral and archival research, the book shows the ways in which fertility and control over reproduction within marriage and the family influenced the development of the "imagined community" of the nascent Zimbabwean nation. Kaler's book reveals the numerous intricate connections among these different domains of social life. Her book also shows how ideas about gender influenced the opposition of African nationalists to the new contraceptive technologies, and played a key role in shaping the nationalists' visions for an independent Zimbabwe. On a more general level, Kaler's book provides a major foundation for understanding the fertility revolution in southern Africa, as manifested in smaller family sizes and widespread acceptance and use of contraceptives. The enormity of change has hitherto been primarily the domain of statisticians and demographers. By focusing on the very beginning of the contraceptive revolution in Zimbabwe, Kaler gives demographic change a place in a social history that highlights the voices and experiences of those who actually participated in this revolution.

Modern contraception is normally associated with an increase in women's freedom. Sexually, it put women on a par with men. But in Rhodesia, before majority rule in 1980, contraception triggered quite a different response amonst some of the Africans. Contraception, and indeed the entire rubric of family planning "was mass murder and genocide, a demographic attack on the African population", in one common view.

Talk about cognitive dissonance! How could something generally looked upon favourably elsewhere take on this meaning? In much of her book, Kaler explains. The minority white government employed family planning workers, to separately serve whites and blacks. The workers themselves sincerely tried to help their clientele. But in the government, there was a vocal element urging family planning to be applied to blacks, to reduce their fertility vis-a-vis the whites. Needless to say, such urgings leaked out to the blacks, and were in turn used by revolutionaries as agitprop against Ian Smith's regime.

(349 pages)

Encyclopedia of Birth Control by: SIMONE M. CARON publisher: ABC-Clio Inc released: 2001-06-01 ISBN: 1576071812 $85.00

The morning-after pill. Condom distribution in the schools. The Pill. Roe v. Wade. Few issues are as divisive in contemporary society as birth control. Men and women continue to battle over the legality and morality of a woman’s ability to control when to have children. Few matters have altered society and culture so profoundly in recent years as the new contraceptive options available to women developed by scientists and birth control advocates.

Pill:, The: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World by: Bernard Asbell publisher: Random House released: 1995-05-23 ISBN: 0679411003 $25.00

Pliny (23-79 AD.) "If a man makes water upon a dog's urine he will become disinclined to copulation." (Yeah, but what about the Dog?) He also suggests that; "If a woman's loins are rubbed with blood taken from the ticks upon the back of a black wild bull, she will be inspired with an aversion to sexual intercourse. (Yes, and so too, the tick gatherer, and tick blood spreader - I would imagine.)
This book The Pill by Bernard Asbell besides being full of useful and energizing information is more than interesting. It is a social as well as a religious experience. One thing is for certain - trying not to have babies has been going on for centuries; thank God.

I almost couldn't put this book down and read it in a few days. Asbell does a really good job of making the story of the Pill at once comprehensive and entertaining. He develops all the various characters involved in the story: priests, scientists, activists, doctors, funders of research and ordinary citizens in a way that makes gives you a sense of familiarity with their personalities and psychologies. He shows how risk taking, serendipity, and passion led some to succeed and left others virtually anonymous. He gives fair treatment to many of scientific disputes that went on during the invention of the pill and introduces us to the future of contraception. The way he describes science is very accessible and also honest; he does not idolize scientists or science and shows the pitfalls involved in research.
I don't think I fully appreciated how revolutionary the Pill was before I read this book. It has made me much more grateful and informed about the options I can now make. He presents the story with the gravity it deserves.

This is a pretty good book and doesn't deserve to be out of print. The author's writing technique isn't scintillating but the book is very readable nonetheless. I was a little disappointed by the lack of biochemical details of how the pill works but other readers may see this as a blessing. The book does a superb job of making the people involved come alive. The descrption of a pre-birth control pill world which is unimagable to most people is simiarly excellent.

A wonderful account of the scientific, medical, political and social contexts surrounding the research and development of the oral contraceptive pill...something I realize that we take for granted and revolutionized our view of ourselves and our way of looking at the future.