Chapter 6, Branding Birth Control, examines how birth-controllers used claims about medical works’ vulnerability to destruction under the Hicklin test to distance contraception from immorality, frame its advocacy as a free speech issue, and generate publicity for the cause. Contraception pamphlets first published by radicals in the 1820s and 1830s had long been sold by both social reformers and pornographers. In 1876, a figure with feet in both domains was arrested for selling Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). The following year, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh engineered their own arrest for selling it. The chapter examines the selective publication history that Bradlaugh and Besant constructed to divorce Fruits from its associations with promoscuity and promote contraception advocacy as a respectable, progressive cause, and shows that birth-controllers went on to sell huge volumes of literature on contraception. Although they encountered relatively little legal opposition, they often claimed that selling such works was very risky. These claims operated as a way of generating further publicity for the cause, and branding it as brave, modern, and progressive.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

This chapter claims that in the new millennium, religious conservatives succeed in their struggles to control women’s bodies and to turn their private prejudices into public policy through the misappropriation of human rights and by gaining unwarranted religious exemptions. By allegedly demanding the protection of their own rights to religious liberty, conscientious objection, equality, and multicultural accommodations, religious conservatives are reversing the progress in women’s rights and using liberal rights and concepts as a weapon against women. The chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the separation between religion and the state cannot protect women’s rights against the religious conservative attack. It compares the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in the USA, where religion is separated from the state, to the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in Israel, where there is no separation between religion and the state, and shows that despite the very different religion–state relations, the religious conservative attack in the USA and Israel is similar in both method and success.

Compared with Britain, industrial transformation occurred more slowly in nineteenth-century France and Italy, forcing two early marginalists from the Lausanne school to pay continued attention to family poverty among the agrarian masses. Although Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto wanted to explain and resolve family impoverishment by securing a market whose outcomes correlated with what families deserved, the two economists diverged on the causes of family impoverishment, and on the best ways to respond. Walras’s ‘social economics’ rejected a popular view that family ‘immorality’ was the cause of family impoverishment, instead identifying badly designed government policy as the key factor. Pareto’s studies of population suggested the opposite position. Assuming government corruption and protective policies had been dismantled, Pareto assigned primary responsibility for poverty to egoistical parents, who should have anticipated cyclical economic decline before having children. Describing Malthus’s rejection of contraception as ‘not very scientific’, Pareto studied ‘people as they are’, finding families to be already limiting fertility through delayed sexual union or contraceptive knowledge. This suggested to Pareto that poverty would disappear spontaneously. Neither Walras nor Pareto explained how to manage existing family destitution or unanticipated economic crisis, and they did not problematise the many structural impediments to escaping one’s class.

The papacy played a central role in the development of Roman Catholic teaching about bioethics. Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930) condemned contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Papal teaching was broadly accepted by Catholics before the 1960s. Widespread dissent in the Church greatly increased after the publication of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968). The first successful IVF procedure in 1978 raised new bioethical issues relating to the status of human embryos outside the womb.

The Catholic hierarchy was more successful in lobbying politicians to enact restrictive laws, or obstruct liberal reforms, than in persuading the laity to accept its teaching on birth control and assisted human reproduction. A rift emerged between mainstream Catholic culture and the institutional Church. The Church is now circumscribed in meeting the challenges presented by complex ethical issues, such as surrogacy and assisted dying, because of the papacy’s inflexible stance on these matters.

Enzyme-inducing antiepileptic drugs (EI-ASMs) such as phenytoin, carbamazepine, oxcarbazepine, and phenobarbital may decrease contraceptive efficacy. When considering contraception for women with epilepsy (WWE), the intrauterine device (IUD) is a first line choice. It is important to keep in mind that hormonal contraception with estrogenic components induces the metabolism of lamotriginePreconception counseling should be started early and revisited frequently for WWE of childbearing age. Pre-partum optimization of ASMs ideally should be done 9−12 months before a planned pregnancy. The majority of WWE are likely to have a safe pregnancy and a healthy newborn.

This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

Cancer treatments can induce temporary or permanent menopause and lead to persistent menopausal symptoms. In reproductive age women, cancer treatment may impair fertility but evaluating fertility and managing contraception can be complex. Managing menopausal symptoms and contraceptive decisions after cancer treatment can be challenging for women and their care providers. In this chapter, we present concepts for managing these consultations and some specific advice for women in particular situations.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

The structure, function, and even the definition of the family have varied tremendously from culture to culture, and for different social groups within each culture. They have changed over time because of internal developments or contacts with other cultures. Not all families centred on a sexual relationship, but most did, institutionalized as marriage, though in this there was wide variety as well. Norms and patterns of sexual familial relationships were how groups defined themselves, maintained their distinctions from other groups, and reinforced hierarchies within the group. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have developed theories of family and kinship, initially seeing evolutionary stages but now emphasizing variety and divergent lines of development, using qualitative and quantitative sources. They have still found major points of transition in family life: the foraging families of the Paleolithic became sedentary crop-raisers, with intensified social hierarchies; centralized states attempted to control reproduction through laws and norms governing marriage and sexual relations; patterns in family life became more rigid in classical cultures and text-based religions; colonialism and industrialization slowly altered family life and norms of sexuality; government intervention in family life expanded in the twentieth century. Today there is an increasing diversity of family forms around the world.

Sydney was the original site of British settlement in Australia and its largest city in the twentieth century. With a reputation for hedonism, Sydney’s identity became entangled, to a marked extent, in its sexual cultures. The preoccupation with whiteness ensured that attitudes to birth control were closely related to settler racial aspirations. State regulation of sex work and female sexuality was also connected to concerns about preserving racial vigour, but it helped to secure a powerful role for organized crime and police corruption in the city’s sex industry. Key Sydney sex radicals and reformers took their place in British imperial and, to an increasing extent, global networks. Gay (or ‘camp’) male subcultures emerged in the middle decades of the century and, after a period of greater freedom during the Second World War, attracted repression in the 1950s. Lesbian subcultures emerged more slowly, but were discernible by the 1960s. At the same time as the contraceptive pill was transforming heterosexual relations, Sydney emerged as Australia’s major centre of gay life as well as a place of notable ethnic diversity and sexual variety. By the end of the century the city’s identity was bound more tightly than ever to its sexual cultures.

This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.