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All forms of contraception illegal in the United States, aside from surgical sterilization. Though legal, surgical sterilization is not widely practiced. A core group of advocates form what is now known as EngenderHealth to push for expanding surgical sterilization services — tubal ligation and vasectomy — nationwide.
Established a revolving fund to help individuals pay the costs of surgical sterilization if they could not afford it on their own.
Birth control pill gains FDA approval and becomes available to American women, although illegal in certain states.
Named the “Association for Voluntary Sterilization,” (AVS) the organization began to directly confront legal, medical, cultural and religious barriers to sterilization. We joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups to oppose compulsory or coerced sterilization of any kind. We supported the legal battles of individuals who had been victims of such practices.
In Griswold v. Connecticut, the United States Supreme Court declares that the right to privacy includes the right to use contraceptives. Modern birth control methods become legal nationwide.
The organization formed an international committee of experts to build support for access to safe and voluntary sterilization in other countries.
AVS supported Planned Parenthood to establish the first outpatient vasectomy clinic at the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in New York City.
Our international work begins as we lead the introduction of safe and voluntary sterilization services globally.
The minilaparotomy, a new form of female surgical sterilization developed in Thailand with support from AVS, is ready to be introduced globally. Minilaparotomy is a simple procedure requiring no special equipment that can be performed with local anesthesia in outpatient settings.
AVS is renamed the Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception, or “AVSC.”
A refined version of male surgical sterilization, the no-scalpel vasectomy, developed by AVSC in partnership with Chinese physician, Dr. Li Shunqiang, is perfected and ready for global introduction.
We launch a comprehensive postabortion care (PAC) initiative designed to reduce deaths among the millions of women suffering injury and death as a result of unsafe abortion.
The United Nations’ International Conference on Population and Development is held in Cairo, where a global consensus recognized that stabilizing population growth and supporting economic development requires a broad effort among many sectors, including family planning and supporting women’s equity and opportunity. Our experience ensuring quality clinical services in poor communities meant we had the capacity to make a difference in improving a wide range of reproductive health services that addressed local needs.
We change our name to EngenderHealth — to reflect our wide portfolio of work supporting quality reproductive health care, with a continued focus on sterilization and family planning.
EngenderHealth receives the United Nations Population Award in recognition of the organization’s longstanding dedication to delivering high quality family planning services throughout the world.
After 65 years, EngenderHealth has reached more than 100 million people in over 100 countries worldwide.
EngenderHealth’s more than 65-year history is one of innovation, commitment, and dynamism. From our beginning as a small, local volunteer association advocating safe and legal sterilization in the United States, EngenderHealth evolved to the leading international organization dedicated to expanding high-quality, clinic-based, client-centered reproductive health services in the poorest countries of the world. We achieved this by tackling tough issues that others shied away from, guided by optimism that when local needs are understood and met, a better life is possible anywhere.
Advocating for a Better Life: The Early Years
Our first 25 years were dedicated to advocating for access to voluntary surgical sterilization (tubal ligation and vasectomy) in the United States at a time when there was no such thing as a legal contraceptive method. With limited resources, our founders worked to educate everyone they could reach—doctors, nurses, legislators, and average citizens—about the need for and social acceptability of sterilization. Then—as now—our work was informed by scientific evidence.
Our messages were heard, access to sterilization was expanded, and we turned our focus to increasing the use of these new services. The centerpiece of our mission then, and still today, was ensuring that individuals considering sterilization had all of the information they needed to make a real choice as to whether it was right for them. We opposed forced sterilization, and for people who freely chose sterilization, we offered a revolving fund that made loans to those unable to pay the costs of the procedure. By the early 1970s, surgical sterilization became—and remains to this day—the most common method of contraception in the United States, surpassing all other forms of family planning.
Going Global
During the 1970s EngenderHealth was transformed from a domestic advocacy and education organization focused on access to voluntary surgical sterilization to an organization at the forefront of defining quality reproductive health care for men and women in the world’s poorest communities. We did this by transferring knowledge about clinical technique, safety, counseling, and informed consent to partners overseas. We created curricula and trained medical teams. We developed facility guidelines and identified technologies to ensure safety and infection prevention even in the most basic clinics in poor, remote regions. Building on our roots as advocates for services, we became the world’s foremost technical authority on surgical sterilization and on the counseling and informed consent needed to protect individuals’ rights and guarantee choice. Within 10 years of launching our global work, we had overcome the barriers posed by religion, law, and capacity to make voluntary sterilization part of numerous national family planning programs and, by the end of the 1970s, the most widely used contraceptive worldwide.
EngenderHealth can rightfully claim a role in the development of safe and voluntary sterilization services in 90 countries. In doing so, we established the fundamentals of quality care—informed choice, respect for clients’ rights, and provision of safe services by well-trained providers. This set the stage for the introduction of other contraceptive technologies, including long-acting methods such as the IUD and implants, in places where many would not have dreamed that such methods would be accepted. Knowing that programs succeeded when communities participated in designing services and when individuals were empowered to use them, we championed a comprehensive approach to reproductive health care.
EngenderHealth Today
While expanding family planning remained paramount, we started addressing the broader context of individuals’ reproductive health, as reflected in our name. Today, our landmark Men As Partners® program fosters men’s support of women’s health and rights. Across the globe, we share our technical expertise to improve obstetric practices that help millions of women to give birth safely to healthy babies. We ensure access to prevention and care for people living with HIV, and we continue to advocate for policy changes that will increase reproductive health options.
For over 65 years, EngenderHealth’s pioneering work has improved access to and quality of family planning and reproductive health services for more than 100 million people. Yet never in our history has the need for our work been greater. With 350 million couples needing family planning, hundreds of thousands of preventable maternal deaths occurring annually, and substandard HIV care impairing treatment, EngenderHealth is forging ahead to empower people in the world’s poorest communities to realize health and well-being that last.
