ABSTRACT
One United States (US) Agency for International Development (AID) official went so far as to call for a crash program to develop birth control technology akin to the “intensive and coordinated research and development effort which solved the problem of controlled nuclear explosion.” By the late 1960s, US government, through AID and the National Institutes of Health, had become a major funder of contraceptive research. By 1983 the US government provided 59 percent of the $167 million in total worldwide expenditures in basic reproductive research, contraceptive research and development, and the evaluation of the long-term safety of existing contraceptive methods. There are three basic biases in contemporary contraceptive research. First, research has focused overwhelmingly on the female reproductive system. A second persistent bias is toward systemic and surgical forms of birth control, as opposed to safer barrier methods. A third bias, linked to the previous two, is a greater concern for contraceptive efficacy than safety.
