Twelve years' experience of AID in a non-NHS clinic is reviewed. Of 381 women treated, 230 became pregnant at least once; 308 pregnancies were achieved in 450 courses of treatment (68%) resulting in 263 live births (85%). For women aged over 35 years the pregnancy rate was 47%. Timing of insemination and treatment with clomiphene are described. The use of fresh or frozen semen and future developments are discussed.

This study analyses the first 366 couples attending the AID Clinic at Nottingham and outlines those social factors which appear to have some bearing on the success of AID treatment. Residence close to the clinic, social class and the employment of the wife all appear to affect success rates.

To investigate the effect of social class on the secondary sex ratio, atotal of 7·2 million births in the period 1975–78 in Japan has been tabulated according to the occupation of the head of the household, paternal and maternal ages and birth order. Although the variation in the sex ratio among occupational classes is not statistically significant, the changes observed are compatible with those reported by other authors. Multipleregression analysis revealed that the association of birth order and paternal age with the sexratio is relatively consistent among different occupational classes, while that of maternal age varies substantially among occupational groups, a significant negative regression on maternal age being observed in agricultural workers.

Guam has experienced a dramatic socioeconomic development since the end of World War II, accompanied by one of the most rapid fertility declines on record. Although Guam has a very low mortality, comparable to that of the United States, its fertility is higher than in most countries with the same income level. It is suggested that the current high fertility results from the pro-natalist pressures associated with Roman Catholicism. The emigration of residents has been completely offset by immigration from the Orient and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Rural-to-urban migration, mainly from the south to the north, did not start until the late 1950s. Since the end of World War II, the military and alien population has accounted for approximately 40% of the total population and has had substantial demographic, political, and socioeconomic effects.

An examination of pregnancy histories for 969 Filipino women assessed the extent to which pregnancy wastage or loss of a live born child influenced completed family size. Respondents were ever married women 45—49 years of age at the time of the survey; most respondents were beyond their childbearing years. It was found that 56% of the women lost at least one pregnancy or a live born child. While it might be expected that the loss of a child would lower completed family size, the findings indicated that women who reported the loss of one or more children had larger completed families than their counterparts who sustained no miscarriages or childhood deaths. Implications of fertility–mortality relationships are discussed.

The mean size of sibship in which children are reared is greaterthan the mean number of children born to those children's parents' generation. In this paper, family size is considered from the child's point of view, and estimates made of how many siblings (and some other relatives) children have, using data from a survey carried out in Great Britain in the late 1960s. The size of the ‘family’ experienced by children is largerthan may at first sight appear. For example, women who married in the period 1941–55 onaverage had 2·2 children, but these women's children grew up, on average, in sibships of3·5 children; 38% of them grew up in a family with four children or more. Moreover, on average, these women's children had six uncles and aunts and possibly twice that number of first cousins. More than half of the children had at least one parent who was brought up in a family with six children or more and almost one in five had at least one parent who came from a family with ten children or more.

One hundred and thirty healthy women who were willing to breast-feed their babies were followed during the first postpartum year to assess their fertility, lactation and bleeding pattern and examine possible relationships between these variables. Seventy-five women were in full nursing and 22 in partial nursing at the end of the 6th postpartum month. Five hundred and three woman-months and nine pregnancies were recorded during full nursing between the 2nd and the 6th month after delivery. The cumulative probability of pregnancy at the end of 6 months in all full nursing women and in non-amenorrhoeic full nursing women was 10.0% and 27.2% respectively. The corresponding figure for partial nursing women was 40–5%.

By the end of the first year, the cumulative probability of pregnancy in full nursing women had increased to 33.9%. Except for the bleeding pattern, no differences were found among full nursing women who did or did not become pregnant.

It was concluded that full nursing women living in an urban setting who want to space pregnancies need additional protection at a time that depends upon the level of assurance wanted.

A survey of 600 married couples in the Irish Republic in 1975 found marked pronatalist attitudes and an overall mean family size of 3·1 children, ranging from 1·1 children for couples with marriage duration of less than 5 years to 5·1 children for couples married for 15 years or longer. Husbands and wives had the same viewson the ideal size for the average family—5·6 children; this is considerably higher than other European survey findings. Overall, 66% of wives said that they had used some formof contraception and this correlates highly with social class, age of wife, educational level and residence. Use of the pill correlates with residence and age but not with social class or education. One-third of the sample would like more information on the subject of family planning. Although very few gave religious attitudes as a reason for not using birth control in general, 13% stated that the pill was immoral.

The success of screening programmes for cancer will depend greatly on public attitudes if sufficiently high levels of participation are tobe attained. The aimof this study was to identify major independent dimensions of public attitudes to cancer through factor analysis of responses to interview questions using a representative population sample. Data were collected by questioning a random sample of 500 persons aged 18 or over in Canberra on their attitudes to and knowledge of cancer and experience of the disease in others knownpersonally to them. Subjects with the disease were excluded. Factor analysis showed four relatively independent attitude dimensions: anxiety about cancer, denial of the threat of cancer, fatalism about prevention and fatalism about control. Item analysis and inter-scale correlations confirmed the internal coherence and relative independence of these dimensions, except that the latter two showed a moderate positive correlation. It is suggested that cancer education and promotion of screening should deal separately yet concurrently with these four attitudes toachieve best effect.