ABSTRACT
Egypt is a low income country whose leaders introduced a family planning program decades ago in order to accelerate economic development. They essentially reversed the approach by designing a program based on the theory that economic development was necessary to stimulate family planning. Accordingly, an ambitious scheme of community development cum family planning was launched in a large number of Egyptian villages. As far as explicit religious ideology is concerned, Egyptian religious authorities had made it clear, even before the National Family Planning Program, that Islamic teaching was not opposed to family planning. Rural Egyptian women seem more likely than their counterparts in other countries to abandon contraception. A crude measure of this is provided by the ratio of current to ever use of contraception, among currently married, fecund women.
