Family Planning

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31967, 19 April 1969, Page 4

Family Planning

The Safest Way: a new up-to-date guide to birth control. By Christine Pickard. Pan Books (paperback). 245 pp. As woman carries the burdens, Dr Pickard asserts, man should leave woman to control her destiny in the birth control field. Much of the objection to birth control methods in general and the Pill in particular, the author) believes, is due to man's reluctance to accept the limitation it imposes on his assertion of superiority. The Pill emerges from Dr Pickard's guide to ways of family planning as quite the most effective method of contraception yet devised and the product is improving all the time. Half tbe book is devoted to the Pill and related issues. The question of sideeffects, beneficent and otherwise, is given close attention. Dr Pickard is reassuring on the possible link between thrombosis and the Pill and is emphatic on the question of the link with cancer. There is no evidence, she asserts, to show that the Pill causes cancer, but there is some evidence to suggest the opposite; that tumour growth is prevented. Synthetic oestrogens and progesterones were administered to women for therapeutic purposes long Reprints Babbitt. By Sinclair Lewis. Jonathan Cape. 380 pp. “Babbitt” is now recognised as Sinclair Lewis's best novel, but right from its pre-publi-cation printing of 80.500 copies it was an assured bestseller. After tbe first edition of 1923, an American critic described it as “almost a perfectly conceived poetic vision of a perfectly standardised money society: it is our native Inferno of the mechanised hinterland.” And even reading the novel now. one can-| not but be impressed, or even frightened, at the realism of I Zenith and its inhabitants, controlled by the “Good Citizens’ League.” Although it is not sewn, the Cape paperback edition stays open and does not shed pages at first read-1 ing, the frustrating habit of i so many glued paperbacks.

before they were used as oral contraceptives.

The question of family planning is of vital importance but it must be admitted that most handbooks on the ques-' tion tend to be much the same and rather dull. Dr Pickard reveals throughout a critical concern with evidence and robust good sense, but what distinguishes “The Saf- ) est Way” is the fact that it is interesting and informative. Family planning is shown to be a fascinating and complex field of study, well worth reading about.