For nearly three decades men and women have increasingly gained the opportunity to control their childbearing with modern contraceptive technologies. In the early 1960s when oral hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine devices first became publicly available in the United States and Europe, the total fertility rate (TFR) in industrialized countries was about 2·7 implying that two-thirds of childbearing couples, some 87 million, were practising contraception. By comparison, in the developing areas, the TFR was 6·1 and only 18% (60 million couples) were contraceptive users. Thirty years later, estimating for 1990, the number of eligible couples practising contraception in the more developed countries (MDCs) is expected to have increased by half, while in the less developed countries (LDCs) the increase is likely to be six times, suggesting as many as 344 million users. Another way to demonstrate the significance of this trend is with a different statistic—that the level of contraceptive use in LDCs in 1990 will exceed half of all couples of childbearing age and be only ten percentage points below the MDC level of 25–30 years ago.