ABSTRACT
Modern marketing techniques reformed the publicity for birth control. The references to suppressed women, battered children, unstable families, or mental retardation were gone. Although they had reviewed commercial packages, none used imagery, actors, or music that was likely to appeal to black women—the largest sector of the audience in Louisiana. About 80,000 women had been initiated into the program across the state; one-third was from Orleans Parish. Women under 21 years were four and one-half times as likely to incur an accidental pregnancy and showed higher rates of quitting a method altogether than were older women. The results of undiagnosed and untreated gonorrhea in women can be permanent sterility, pelvic inflammatory diseases, blindness in infants, or stillbirths and miscarriages. Although black women constituted 30 percent of those in need of subsidized contraceptive services nationally, in Louisiana they made up the majority.
