Contraception Books

What birth control method is most reliable? Can contraceptives protect me from AIDS? How can I choose the method that's best for me? Finding the answers to these and other questions about birth control can be tough. On the one hand, today's young couples have many contraceptive options. On the other hand, each option has pluses and minuses that must be weighed.

This book is a detailed guide to the methods of birth control currently available, plus a brief review of new methods being developed. Each chapter describes a specific method and provides information to help you choose a contraceptive suited to you and your current situation. Chapters discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each contraceptive, safety concerns, general effectiveness, side effects, costs, and how to obtain and use it.

As you think about the birth control options available to you, remember no single method may be ideal or totally reliable. Furthermore, many contraceptives have some side effects and most require a certain amount of care in their use. To choose the right one for you, be thoughtful about the disadvantages as well as the advantages. If you are comfortable with your birth control choice, you are more likely to use it every time and to stick with it. If possible, the decision about what method to choose should be made with your spouse. As this guide demonstrates, it is much easier to use a contraceptive correctly when both of you are involved.

This guide includes up-to-date information on new products, such as the female condom and the non-latex male condom. Only birth control methods that are currently available or show every promise of being available soon are discussed.

The book also provides details about contraception and its relation to sexually transmitted diseases, with an emphasis on AIDS. Also offered is an expanded discussion of "emergency" contraception, designed for use after unprotected sex. Many of the methods discussed in this guide require a visit to a health practitioner as such at family planning services, independent clinics and hospitals.

Although clearly intended for someone planning to use a contraceptive method, this book is detailed enough to be useful to nurses and youth counselors interested in the subject. Whether you intend to have children or not, every newlywed couple owes it to themselves and their loved ones to read this book.

Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Azlan is Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo. He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the Westminster Business School in London.

What birth control method is most reliable? Can contraceptives protect me from AIDS? How can I choose the method that's best for me? Finding the answers to these and other questions about birth control can be tough. On the one hand, today's young couples have many contraceptive options. On the other hand, each option has pluses and minuses that must be weighed.

This book is a detailed guide to the methods of birth control currently available, plus a brief review of new methods being developed. Each chapter describes a specific method and provides information to help you choose a contraceptive suited to you and your current situation. Chapters discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each contraceptive, safety concerns, general effectiveness, side effects, costs, and how to obtain and use it.

As you think about the birth control options available to you, remember no single method may be ideal or totally reliable. Furthermore, many contraceptives have some side effects and most require a certain amount of care in their use. To choose the right one for you, be thoughtful about the disadvantages as well as the advantages. If you are comfortable with your birth control choice, you are more likely to use it every time and to stick with it. If possible, the decision about what method to choose should be made with your spouse. As this guide demonstrates, it is much easier to use a contraceptive correctly when both of you are involved.

This guide includes up-to-date information on new products, such as the female condom and the non-latex male condom. Only birth control methods that are currently available or show every promise of being available soon are discussed.

The book also provides details about contraception and its relation to sexually transmitted diseases, with an emphasis on AIDS. Also offered is an expanded discussion of "emergency" contraception, designed for use after unprotected sex. Many of the methods discussed in this guide require a visit to a health practitioner as such at family planning services, independent clinics and hospitals.

Although clearly intended for someone planning to use a contraceptive method, this book is detailed enough to be useful to nurses and youth counselors interested in the subject. Whether you intend to have children or not, every newlywed couple owes it to themselves and their loved ones to read this book.

Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Formerly Business Development Manager with KPMG, Azlan is currently Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management Group, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo. He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the Westminster Business School in London.

This small paperback is a rich guide to the details of virtually all contraceptive choices available to Americans. This is Planned Parenthood's third book that focuses on health and sexuality issues. Despite the organization's obvious support of contraception, the material is presented with regard to individual religious or moral beliefs. Essentially, each type of birth control is presented with a listing of the pros and cons. One particularly helpful chapter addresses the question of how to choose the right contraception for yourself. This would be a good guide for anyone choosing birth control for the first time or considering a new method.

From the L.A. Times Book Review

An interesting look at sexual and contraceptive attitudes in mid-century America. Not too dry at all, especially as it is liberally peppered with text from interviews conducted by the authors.

This book made me think about a comment from Professor Robert Richmond Ellis. He stated that he was going to write a book about Spanish-speaking gay autobiographies, but he learned that Latin American works always brought up issues of race in ways that Spanish counterparts did not. I didn't read Professor Gutmann's book about masculinity in Mexico City, but I imagine that this book may be its diametrical opposite in that Oaxaca is presented as rural and having a large indigenous population.

Professor Gutmann is very interested in the superstructure. Whereas other academics or laypeople would point to culture as the reason for most phenomena, this author points to governmental rules, global companies' profits, economies, and international migration as the cause of many items. For example, he stated that Chinese men don't choose to use condoms for fun; their government's one-child policy forces them to use protection. With regard to Mexico, he notes that the Mexican government is complicit with global pill companies in not bringing the price of HIV meds down. He states that if family planning clinics only focus on women, then few men will know they have the option of getting a vasectomy. In the book, one chapter tends to speak about these superstructural matters and the following chapter would speak about the author's everyday conversations with Oaxacans. For readers that don't care for academic-speak, they can easily skip over the more complicated chapters.

The penultimate chapter on indigenous healing is a bit extraneous. He begins by saying curanderos often don't employ rigid dichotomies between the sexes. The chapter only marginally speaks of men's sexual choices. It's kinda just a way to lengthen the book.

Dr. Gutmann becomes upset when any Mexican says, "Mexican men get HIV because they are so horny, that they'll even sleep with men." Logically, he points out to such speakers that when he asks of any man who has kicked it with men they say no. A huge purpose in this book is for him to detail other ways that Oaxacan men catch HIV. However, by finding the exceptions, he may be hiding the rule in a dangerous way. There is a book about gays and HIV in the Yucatan and the American professor there detailed the many ways that HIV-positive Mexican men do everything possible to not reveal same-sex action. Gutmann himself interviews many Mexican men that admit that they have had sex with gay men or prostituted themselves with men. One thing I do love is that he describes a "mix'e" who seems like a Mexican two-spirit person. I once read in a book on Aztecs in a small footnote that they probably had third-gender men like US Native American tribes had. Perhaps this book should be read in conjunction with other books on indigenous homosexuality in the Americas.

Gutman is a progressive with a wife and two daughters. He may not be knowledgeable of the huge numbers of communities and nations of color that dismiss gayness as "a white scourge" or "unknown to us before colonialism," etc. Several African, African-American, South Asian gay activists have tried to challenge that fallacy. So, in this light, it is amazing that heterosexual Oaxacans can admit that same-sex liaisons happen. They never blame US Americans or Europeans for "forcing" Mexican men to get busy in that way. The way that these Oaxacans challenge gay invisibility in this non-white context is amazing and wonderful, yet Dr. Gutmann gives a positive review of that phenomenon. I may not have articulated this well, but I find it troubling that Dr. Gutmann did not take this into acount.

As far as I know, Professor Gutmann was not teaching at Brown when I was an undergraduate there. Still, countless students speak about how they wish more classes would bring issues of race, gender, sexuality, national identity, and justice matters together. Well, Gutmann accomplishes that in this book and something tells me his classes would be awesome to take. I imagine that books like this one could be useful to not only anthro majors, but also gender studies majors. This is especially true as gender studies departments try to discuss men's issues, and not just women's issues. Really, his presence and writing may be just another countless reason for students to apply to and matriculate to this awesome university.

I found "How Not to Get Pregnant" to a thorough commentary on how conception occurs and how it can be controlled. The focus of the book is on preventing pregnancy, but I found that it educated me on the workings of the human reproductive system in such a way that I understand how to avoid pregancy or how to become pregant quite well. The explantions appear to be accurate and educational (although I admit I am not professionally qualified to comment on the accuracy).

The first chapter explains the human reproductive system in great detail, and although I am a father who has been married for many years, I learned the subject in a more detailed and useful manner than I had previously. Subsequent chapters investigate every method of birth control I have ever heard of, including "natural" methods of birth control and those enabled by modern medicine. Topics were covered in such a way that the needs of people with differing values, religions, and livestyles are addressed. Every topic was fairly treated with pros and cons discussed.

This was a great book and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about human reproduction and how they can control it. My only reservation is that it was originally published more than a decade ago, and I am certain that new information is available. However, I question whether a book as readable and understandable has been written in the last decade.

I have a web page about tubal sterilization, and because of all the feedback I've been receiving from my visitors, I have been searching for any information I can find about tubal sterilization. This book was an amazing find for me. It answers my questions and concerns in great detail. It is written for the educated layperson. Unlike far too many other resources, it does NOT omit valuable information in the misguided attempt to simplify the facts. I recommend this book to everyone interested in reproductive health and contraception.

You are invited to visit my tubal sterilization page.

lublin scrunches feminist theory into several smart, neat chapters while commenting on reproductive politics. i enjoyed reading it--especially the footnotes. very meaty footnotes.

Modern contraception is normally associated with an increase in women's freedom. Sexually, it put women on a par with men. But in Rhodesia, before majority rule in 1980, contraception triggered quite a different response amonst some of the Africans. Contraception, and indeed the entire rubric of family planning "was mass murder and genocide, a demographic attack on the African population", in one common view.

Talk about cognitive dissonance! How could something generally looked upon favourably elsewhere take on this meaning? In much of her book, Kaler explains. The minority white government employed family planning workers, to separately serve whites and blacks. The workers themselves sincerely tried to help their clientele. But in the government, there was a vocal element urging family planning to be applied to blacks, to reduce their fertility vis-a-vis the whites. Needless to say, such urgings leaked out to the blacks, and were in turn used by revolutionaries as agitprop against Ian Smith's regime.

Life is more complex.If you like this important and insightful book you will almost certainly enjoy "single a documentary film'....insightful.expert and humorous....see www.singlefilm.com....the dvd is available on amazon .com

This book represents an amazing job... it is a compendium with a kind of narrative that helps reading it like a novel.