The users of birth control clinics

At the request of the Family Planning Association a Working Party is inquiring into the Association’s work and organisation. In 1960 the Working Party conducted a national survey of the work, organisation and financing of the network of voluntary birth control clinics which the Association had established chiefly since 1948. The main findings of this survey are contained in the Working Party’s interim report, Family Planning and Family Planning Clinics To-day, issued in a restricted edition by the Association in May, 1962. This paper presents the gist of one chapter, assessing the contribution made by clinics to the birth control behaviour of the British people. The clinic survey followed less than twelve months after the Population Investigation Committee’s Marriage Survey so that it was possible to fit data about clinic users into the Marriage Survey’s wider context. To this end tabulations specially prepared by the Marriage Survey are incorporated in this paper.

Clinic users in 1960 were virtually all women. They differed from the majority of birth control users in that they preferred, or at least were advised to try, a minority method—the female cap—which is only slowly gaining in popularity. Clinics recommended this method to virtually all clients, whether newly-wed or mothers of large families. They were consulted by about one in every nine women marrying during the year and by between 1 and 1 1/2 per cent of wives at each later stage of family building. Among clinic users non-manual occupations are more strongly represented, and unskilled and semi-skilled occupations less strongly represented, than in the total population. Many who go to clinics are not beginners, but want to try a different method. But one-third of new clients are women who have not yet borne a child, nearly all young and just starting married life. The growing population of newly-weds among clients is altering the nature of clinic work. Regionally there is evidence of increasing conservatism in clinic work and clinic clientele as one moves from London to Scotland.