Man is essentially a gregarious animal and is subject, therefore, to both biological and social pressures. As a result, almost everything hedoes has biosocial reper cussions. This is especially true of reproduction, which is a biological process with an overriding social impact. If human reproduction came to an end, so would the human race. By contrast the present unprecedented combination of a high repro ductive rate and a high survival rate is causing widespread concern. One may takethe view that mankind, by reason of its exploding numbers, is rushing to a Gadarene doom, or the opposite view that man has brains as well as gonads and will cope with his proliferation. In either case, one must admit that at the present time there is a population problem.

There is a great deal of interest in the relation between the status of women and fertility—by humanists, academics and policy-makers concerned with bringing about fertility declines. The three aspects of women's status most frequently linked to fertility are their education, employment and type of husband-wife interaction. Research to date has not given us a clear and consistent explanation of these relationships and has not confirmed causality. The effects of these three factors on fertility vary considerably across national boundaries and even within different sectors of the same society. Some of the assumptions held by both researchers and policymakers must be re-thought in the interests of more useful future research and of sounder policy.

Most women in Western society seem to reach the menopause in their early fifties; the median age in this Aberdeen series being 50.1 years. As far as symptoms were concerned, only the vasomotor disorders, flushing and night sweats, were definitely correlated with the menopause.

Intra-uterine contraception is a useful method of fertility control, because of its applicability at all levels of socio-economic development and it has been the mainstay of the fertility control programme in many countries.

The present evaluation is based on the hospital follow-up records of 4067 IUD cases from randomly selected mission hospitals for the years 1967 and 1968. Of the insertions, 97·7% were non-post-partum, and 60% of the acceptors were from the age group 25–34 years with a median age of 29·8 years; nearly 70% had fewer than four living children. The pattern of distribution by religion is similar to that of the 1961 census figures.

The average number of women months (6·7) of IUD use is very low in a follow-up study of 24 months but is more or less consistent, both by age and parity.

The incidence of expulsion, removal and pregnancy was 8·2, 12·9 and 0·6 respectively for all ages and although these rates were higher with the 27½-mm loop than the 30-mm loop the differences are not statistically significant.

The rates of expulsion, removals and complaints were greatest during the first 6 months of use and decreased gradually with increase in duration of use.

Bleeding, or other symptoms associated with bleeding, were the main reasons for the removals.

Incidence of re-insertion was higher among those aged <25 years than among those aged ≥25 years and the difference in the proportion of re-insertions between the two age groups is statistically significant.

The size of the loop seems to have no bearing on the incidence of re-insertions.

Total termination rates at the end of 6, 12, 18 and 24 months were 9·9, 15·2, 25·0 and 55·9 per 100 first insertions respectively.

The names we use for our own species represent general attitudes, many of which were adumbrated by the Greeks. Linnaeus called us Homo sapiens, or thinking man, and his image may be represented by Athene, the goddess of wisdom and my favourite deity. Equally justified is Homo faber, man the maker, represented by Vulcan or Hephaistos. Another aspect of man has been given confusing prominence recently; for man the warrior I have had to invent a name, Homo pugnax—Mars or Ares. Homo ludens has also been proposed (Huizinga, 1970); his counterpart was perhaps Hermes.

A cross-sectional study was performed on 1527 Thai women, 1270 of whom had received from one to twenty-five consecutive 3-month contraceptive injections of 150 mg of depo medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) and a monthly oral oestrogen supplement. Analysis of data revealed that use of DMPA and breast nodules are independent.

Literature on the subject of the menopause, primarily from the past three decades, is selectively reviewed in the form of an annotated bibliography. In order to highlight particular methodological problems, the review is presented in three sections, each preceded by a brief discussion, as follows: (a) the general report of clinical observation or experience, (b) the survey, and (c) the clinical trial. Several recommendations are also made for further research in this field.

The commencement of demographic transition with rapid mortality decline and changing fertility patterns has been studied prospectively for 20 years among over 5000 persons in Buka and New Ireland—two pre-industrial societies of New Guinea. The demographic study has been complemented by a detailed social study of fertility variables in three societies.

At the commencement of the study the New Ireland society had a high level of primary and secondary sterility of gonorrhoeal origin which disappeared among the younger women after mass penicillin therapy. The mean age at marriage is no longer immediately post-menarchal; the mean age of mother at birth of first child varied between 18·7 and 20·6 years; and the mean age of cessation of reproduction approached 44 years.

The three societies each show differing degrees of demographic transition with social patterns in one hardly changed by culture contact through to occasional voluntary use of introduced contraceptive techniques. The most important changes in fertility variables over the 20-year survey were the decrease in duration of post-partum abstinence from intercourse, the increase in continuity of cohabitation in marriage and other pronatal effects.

The demographic assessment of Buka showed age specific fertility rates for 1962–67 of over 300 per each 5-year age group between the ages of 20 and 39 with total fertility reaching a maximum of 8680 and with consequent changes in family size. The mean birth interval for births fell from 3·15 years for persons with first births between 1947 and 1953 to 2·13 years where the first birth was after 1961. There are several levels of reproduction with a mean birth interval for women for the most productive group of 2·00 years. The current mean interval for births of 2·16 years is consistent with a maximum biological level of reproduction for a society using breast feeding as the sole significant negative factor affecting fertility.

The associated rapid mortality decline and improved health of the community were due to the control of malaria and available rural health services as part of authoritarian health measures. Fertility decline consistent with transition theory would require community participation in child spacing to re-establish the traditional family size of three to four surviving children. This would entail the introduction of biochemical and mechanical contraception to fill the role previously taken by post-partum abstinence from intercourse and high infant mortality.

When I was first invited to give this year's Marie Stopes Memorial Lecture I had to express my reservations, as my ignorance of Marie Stopes' work was, I'm afraid, profound. I was assured that the talk could simply be on any area relevant or only indirectly related to Marie Stopes' work. I assumed from this that the reason for my invitation was to associate Marie Stopes' achievements with the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. Since those days of pristine ignorance two things have happened to me. First, I have now read a certain amount on and by Marie Stopes, and second, I have read the lecture that Laurie Taylor gave here last year entitled ‘Marie Stopes—The Unfinished Sexual Revolution—but also extremely annoying. Here was a man extraordinarily sensitive to the facile male chauvinism of his predecessors: those biographers who had let a stuffy nervousness about Marie Stopes' stress on her own life-long sexual needs mar their tale, often turning an adventurous and unconventional woman into a disturbed and frustrated eccentric: someone who was not a ‘fuffilled’ woman. In his talk Laurie Taylor more than righted the balance for he not only corrected the priggish sexism of others, and was himself unusually free from it, but, moreover, he managed to place Stopes' work in a context of serious theories of sexual revolution. In other words, on reading last year's lecture I found my task already done. It is a rare and pleasant occasion when one can defer to the anti-male chauvinism of a male critic, and I do so with great satisfaction. In fact I wish to do more than to defer to it; I wish to take advantage of it. For I want today to use Marie Stopes merely as a jumping-off point, only vaguely relating her preoccupations to those of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. I am afraid I even want to be critical of aspects of her great achievement in spreading birth control and gynaecological health in a way for which, goodness knows, we are all most grateful today. For an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement to come and speak in honour of one of the women who in this century has done so much for women and ignore that honour or even turn it to criticism, is, I'm afraid, a dishonourable act. I feel I've been asked here in double trust and I am, in a way, going to abuse both.