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A Look Back at the History of Family Planning from the Archives of the Royal College of Physicians

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Dr. Laura Robson-Mainwaring, Health Records Specialist, The National Archives

December 27, 2019

As a Health Records Specialist at The National Archives, I’m interested in archival documents relating to healthcare, and the personal and political implications of these records. I’m interested in the stories they tell about individuals, and how they can be used to paint an accurate picture of policies, treatments, and public opinions at certain points in history. By looking at the digitized archives of the Royal College of Physicians we can explore original documents concerning the history of family planning which continues to inform healthcare and policy decisions today.

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Newspaper Cutting. Advertisement by Dr. Speer. The Sunday Times, Sydney.
College Legal Status. November 13, 1892. Royal College of Physicians

What is Family Planning?

The World Health Organization defines Family Planning as “allowing individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children and the spacing and timing of their births. It is achieved through the use of contraceptive methods and the treatment of involuntary infertility. A woman’s ability to space and limit her pregnancies has a direct impact on her health and well-being as well as on the outcome of each pregnancy.” More broadly, it can also relate to antenatal care, obstetrics, immunizations, and prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections. It is tied up with religious, cultural, economic and human rights issues.

Historically, the British State has not been involved in the reproductive practices of its citizens. With the rise of the welfare state in Britain and the inception of the National Health Service, birth control became part of educational campaigns and the provision of mother and child welfare services increased.

Mother and Child Welfare and Reproductive Rights

I initially considered the topic within the context of the individual and how they may have attempted to control their own reproduction before the rise of state involvement in the twentieth century. I searched for the terms “abortion” and “abortifacient”, which bought up 633 results and 39 respectively within the RCP archive, including lots of material from the Censor’s Board on Criminal Abortion and the duties of the medical practitioner as well as literature relating to the morality of contraception and abortion such as the 1907 document Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods: Report of the Royal Commission on (Volume I) which discussed “interference with the arrangements of nature.” 

Mother and Child Welfare has historically been relevant in a medical context, with the high-death rate of infants and mothers during and after pregnancy. For example, the Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health for the Year 1938, reported on the findings of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion, and identified a number of failings in the provision of care. The report included discussions about improving maternal mortality and morbidity by amending the law on abortifacient drugs and contraception. These topics are still valid today, particularly in countries where access to and education of contraception and abortion is limited.  

Advertising Abortifacients

In my search, I also considered terms that we might not use today such as “Removing all Obstructions” and “Female Pills”. Using a mixture of these terms I uncovered newspaper advertisements that were investigated by the RCP Censor’s Board in relation to the malpractice of doctors. This newspaper advertisement, which was flagged up to the Board, promotes a doctor who will help with “removing of all obstructions” and refers to abortion as “the French silent remedy”.

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A “Report of the Royal Commission on Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods” in 1907, focuses on the use of drugs made up of unknown ingredients to procure abortions. The use of these types of sources are valuable in giving researchers the ability to chart the opinions of the profession as well as individual medical practitioners on the subject of family planning.

Population Control

The limiting of reproduction is also tied to larger society. Population control as a wider concept can be considered as relevant to Government policy as economic planning. China's one-child policy, for example, was part of a birth planning program designed to control the size of its population, which can be seen to have involved interventionist coercive measures and saw the rise of infanticide. The twentieth century also saw the ramifications of linking control of reproduction to political ideologies, with the rise of ideas linked to sterilization and eugenics. Population control will remain significant in the future particularly with concerns over climate change. This has also been very topical this year in popular culture withpopulation fears forming the plot in the Avengers, which as of 2019 is the highest grossing film of all time.

Documents in the Royal College of Physicians relating to population growth include a report by R Price Williams “On the Increase of Population in England and Wales” that was read before the Statistical Society in 1880, and highlighted fears about the increase of the population.

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I also searched for the terms “Family Planning” and “Birth Control”, which led me on to a lot of literature concerning the increase of population from the late nineteenth-century. Surprisingly, I found some relatively early books relating to perceived desirable traits from eminent physicians, including John Edward Morgan’s, The Danger of Deterioration of Race from the Too Rapid Increase of Great Cities, 1866 and Benjamin Ward Richardson’s, On Name and Race in England, 1874.

I also found a book advertisement for the famous birth control campaigner Marie Stopes in a document named The Medical Who's Who, 1912-18 in the archive collectionStopes campaigned for the use of birth control to aid the poor, but this was a double-edged aim as she was also a member of the eugenics society.

Where Does This Story Lead?

In my research, I focused on material from the Royal College of Physicians archive but there was a lot of results using the Wiley resource relating to population and birth control at both the The New York Academy of Sciences and The Royal Anthropological Institute. For example, a digitized report on the Conference on World Population Problems and Birth Control in 1951 was digitized as part of The New York Academy of Sciences collections. If researchers are interested in the political contexts of this topic, the Wiley Digital Archives Analysis Hub could also be a useful tool. The chart below shows that a higher number of documents referred to eugenics in the early twentieth century, peaking during the period when the eugenics society was founded and again in the 1930s, which coincided with the rise of racially based social policies like Nazism.

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Eugenics chart

Many of the digitized books also contain charts listing birth rates and death rates, which could be useful for researchers trying to explore the relationship between family planning and mortality. By using these digitized sources, you can really begin to chart changing attitudes to birth control in its varying economic, cultural, and medical contexts.

To learn more about the history of science and medicine, or to request a free trial visit the Royal College of Physicians archives page on Wiley Digital Archives.

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