ABSTRACT
The early twentieth-century pioneers of the international family planning movement were individuals like Margaret Sanger in the United States and Marie Stopes in Britain who, in the face of fierce opposition, advocated voluntary motherhood and the right of married women to control their fertility through modern contraceptive devices. The first government to provide a family planning program with the aim of reducing national fertility-and thereby controlling the increase of population over time-was India in 1952. Significant impetus was thus given in the mid-1960s to the formation and external funding of national family planning programs in the Third World. By 1976, as many as sixty-three countries in the less developed world, embracing 92 percent of its population, had launched their own programs or endorsed those of private groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The dawning realization of a vigorous frontier's development leads the government to introduce policies to manage access to and exploitation of the frontier.
