India has the distinction of being the first country in the developing world to initiate a family planning programme-it later came to be called the Family Welfare Programme (FWP)-with a view to bring down the country's fertility level and contain population growth.

Both as a concept and as a rallying point for gender-based concerns, the emergence of reproductive choice is a relatively new phenomenon in the area of population policy. For decades on end, population policy had been primarily, if not solely, concerned with the regulation and control of human fe

Fertility in Pakistan has shown a stubborn resistance to change. Because of sharp declines in mortality following World War II, the population of Pakistan was growing at the rate of 2.7 percent per annum around 1960.

The women's groups were able to actively agitate against population control policies at conference on environment held in Rio-de-Janeiro in 1992, at conference on human rights at Vienna 1993, and then they were able to get the POA (Programme of Action) of the conference on population and developm

The planet is getting polarized in demographic and economic terms. Developing countries experience problems with their population growth along with pervasive poverty.

The importance of postpartum amenorrhoea for reducing fertility is especially pronounced in a developing country like Bangladesh where levels of contraceptive use have until recently remained relatively low. The duration of postpartum amenorrhoea in Bangladesh is among the longest in the world.

The recent decline in fertility in Bangladesh froin a total fertility rate of 6.3 children per women in 1975 to 3.5 in 1995 (MHPC, 1978:73; BBS, 1996) has created interest among researchers, policy makers and academicians.

This paper discusses contraceptive use and discontinuation among women in north Vietnam, in the context of a strong culture preference for sons and a stringent two-child population policy. Among a random sample of 1432 married women aged 15-49 in a rural province in north Vietnam in l994, nearly