Childbearing intentions among women in high-fertility contexts are usually classified into those wanting to have a baby, those wanting to ‘space’ a birth and those wanting to ‘limit’ their family size. However, evidence from Africa increasingly suggests that women’s intentions are more complex than this classification suggests, and that there is fluidity in these intentions. This research explores women’s accounts of their childbearing intentions and decisions in order to examine how this fluidity plays out in a low-fertility context in urban Africa. Six focus group discussions were conducted in April and May 2012 with women of reproductive age in Nairobi, Kenya. Participants were recruited using random and purposive sampling techniques. The focus group discussions had an average of seven participants each. Data were coded thematically and analysed using Nvivo software. The analysis explored the factors that women consider to be influential for childbearing and found that the health of the mother and child, costs of raising a child and relationships were commonly reported to be important. Evidence of intentions to space births and limit family size was found. However, the data also showed that there is fluidity in women’s family planning intentions, driven by changes in relationships or household finances, which often result in a desire to avoid pregnancy in the present moment. The fluidity observed in women’s childbearing intentions cannot be accounted for by the concepts of either ‘spacing’ or ‘limitation’ but is best explained by the concept of ‘postponement’. The research reveals the need for family planning clinics to provide a full method mix, as well as high-quality counselling, to enable women to choose a method that best suits their needs.

In 1920 in France, a law was passed prohibiting abortion, the sale of contraceptives and ‘anti-conception propaganda’. While contraception was legalised in 1967 and abortion in 1975, ‘anti-natalist propaganda’ remained forbidden. This article takes seriously the aim of the French state to prevent the circulation of information for demographic reasons. Drawing from government archives, social movement archives and media coverage, the article focuses on the way the propaganda ban contributed to shaping the public debate on contraception as well as lastingly impacting the ability of the state to communicate on the subject. It first shows how birth control activists challenged the legal interdiction against communicating about contraception (1956–67) without questioning the natalist obligation. It then shows how, after 1968, communication on contraception became a power struggle carried out by various actors (sexologists and feminist and leftist activists) and how the dissemination of information about contraception was thought of as a way to challenge moral and social values. Finally, the article describes the change of state communication policies in the mid-1970s, leading to the first national campaign on contraception launched in 1981, which defined information as a task that women should take on.

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

This paper explores the influence of English female doctors on the creation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge in England and, to a lesser extent in France, between 1930 and 1970. By drawing on the writings of female doctors and proceedings of international conferences as well as the archives of the British Medical Women’s Federation (MWF) and Family Planning Association (FPA), on the one hand, and Mouvement Français pour le Planning Familial (MFPF), on the other, this paper explores the agency of English female doctors at the national and transnational level. I recover their pioneering work and argue that they were pivotal in legitimising family planning within medical circles. I then turn to their influence on French doctors after World War II. Not only were English medical women active and experienced agents in the family planning movement in England; they also represented a conduit of information and training crucial for French doctors. Transfer of knowledge across the channel was thus a decisive tool for implementing family planning services in France.

This essay examines pressures and theological developments regarding sexuality and birth control within Anglicanism, as represented by statements from Lambeth Conferences and in discussions in the Church of England during the early to mid twentieth century, and notes some of the changes in ‘official’ position within US churches and especially The Episcopal Church. It offers comparison with the developments in moral theology within the Roman Catholic Church after 1930 and asks if, and by what means, the two Communions may come to agree on the specific issue of contraception.

With an increase in poaching of elephants Loxodonta africana across Africa, it is vital to know exactly how many elephants remain and where they occur, to ensure that protection and management are planned appropriately. From a nationwide survey we provide current population and distribution data for elephants in South Africa. We consider the viability of elephant populations in the country, as well as some of the management techniques implemented and how effective these are in controlling elephant numbers. According to our surveys there were 28,168 elephants in South Africa as of December 2015, with 78% of these occurring in Kruger National Park and reserves bordering and open to the Park. Of the country's 78 discrete reserves that host elephants, 77% have populations of < 100 elephants, which could mean they are not genetically viable. We discuss our findings in terms of the conservation value of South Africa's elephant reserves, and the animal welfare implications. We recommend that the fragmentation of elephant habitat in the country be addressed through a national elephant management strategy that promotes wildlife corridors between existing, neighbouring elephant reserves.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.

When this essay appears in print, it will be two years since the death of legal philosopher and constitutional law scholar Ronald Dworkin. One recurring reminder of the magnitude of that loss is the absence of Dworkin's regular, insightful essays for the New York Review of Books analyzing significant US Supreme Court decisions. Thus, when, last term, a closely divided (5–4) Court released its much-anticipated decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, upholding a challenge by three for-profit corporations to the contraceptive coverage provisions (the so-called contraceptive mandate) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), sadly missing in the flurry of commentary was Dworkin's assessment of the case. Readers of this journal may perhaps appreciate the allusion when I say that the decision prompted me to wonder, “What would Dworkin do?” That same question arose again when, on July 3, 2014, in Wheaton College v. Burwell, over a strong dissent by Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan, the Court granted the emergency request of Wheaton College to be relieved from complying with the ACA's accommodation procedure for religious nonprofit organizations that object to contraceptive coverage on religious grounds, even before the lower courts had ruled on the merits of the college's claim.

One major source of conflict in contemporary sexual ethics (e.g., artificial contraception and abortion) is the implicit difference in the worldviews represented by the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Those who are pro-life support the notion of human personhood as a fixed and unchanging reality from conception to death; those who are pro-choice, in contrast, support the notion of human personhood as developmental, never fully realized. The pro-life position basically reflects the worldview of classical metaphysics; the pro-choice position is logically grounded in process philosophy and theology. The aim of the present article is to compare and contrast these two worldviews so as to see whether or not there is unexpected common ground between the two that could logically justify a consensus position on the more specific moral issues.

This article addresses how and why liberal democratic constitutions, such as the United States, have come to recognise the tension between liberal values of equal liberty and patriarchy in three areas – contraception, abortion, and gay/lesbian sex acts – and to resolve them in the way in which they have: by extending constitutional protection to these activities on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy. The article begins with some historical understanding of the background of the rise of patriarchy, and why the control of sexuality in general, and women's sexuality in particular, was so central to its aims. It then turns to how and why liberal constitutionalism has found these aims to be so problematic as a basis for law.