This paper analyses, from the perspective of women's human rights, an unsuccessful attempt to amend the abortion law in the Penal Code of Sri Lanka in 1995.

While the world's major killer disease, smallpox, that used to claim millions of lives has been eliminated, the planet has been struck with a more dreaded disease, AIDS or Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome.

Demographic literature is replete with observations of an inverse relation between certain attributes of modernity and family size (Thompson 1929; Notestein 1945; Coale and Hoover 1958; Leiberman 1980, Srinivasan 1986).