Perhaps no other social attitude has changed so markedly in this century as the prevailing public reaction towards the question of the limitation of population growth and the use of birth control devices.

In my childhood, the large families of our working-class neighbourhood were subjected to the derision of smug and usually protestant parents of neat, small families who viewed such unrestrained childbearing as evidence of a feckless and undisciplined life style, devoid of proper moral restraint. This decade has seen the advocates of zero population growth and of women’s liberation add their voices to the cause of population control. Yet in the early years of this century such moral condemnation was reserved for those who advocated the use of birth control, in an intellectual climate which saw the prevention of conception as undermining the very basis of Christian marriage and which gloomily viewed a declining birth-rate as evidence of ‘racial decay’ and a threat to the survival of the Anglo-Saxon race on the Australian continent.