OBJECTIVE To develop a global research agenda that will guide investment in effective interventions to satisfy the large unmet need for modern methods of family planning. METHODS In a global survey, experts on contraception were invited to identify and rank the types of research that would be needed--and the knowledge gaps that would have to be filled--to reduce the unmet need for family plan...

Reducing the global unmet need for contraception is currently a priority for many governments, multi-lateral initiatives, non-governmental organizations, and donors. Evidence strongly suggests that the provision of quality family planning services can increase uptake, prevalence, and continuation of contraception. While an accepted framework to define the components of family planning service q...

BACKGROUND Much of the research literature about the use of family planning generalizes contraceptive use among all women, using age as a covariate. In Uganda, a country with divergent trends in modern family planning use, this study was set to explore whether or not the predictors of contraceptive use differ by age. This was assessed by using data from the 2011 Uganda Demographic and Health Su...

PURPOSE Natural Family Planning (NFP) requires periodic abstinence and partner cooperation to prevent pregnancy. The aim of this study was to learn about the effects of modern NFP methods on marital relationships. DESIGN Descriptive survey. METHODS Questionnaires were mailed to 1,400 randomly selected couples known to use NFP and residing in the United States of America; 334 couples (24%) r...

BillingsMentor is an automated Web-based service for the Billings Method of natural family planning in which the guidance and interpretation previously communicated from teacher to student is provided by programmed algorithms. There are two functions: (1) to instruct the client to generate proper descriptions of her fertility symptoms; and (2) to interpret the symptoms efficiently according to ...

The objective of the study was to test the hypothesis that gender can be preselected by timing coitus in relation to ovulation, the marker of ovulation being the Peak symptom according to the Billings Method. A blind prospective study of 99 couples wishing to preselect the sex of their child was conducted in Nigeria, using the Post-Peak approach of Billings Method for males and Pre-Peak for fem...

In an assessment conducted 30 months after a Philadelphia-area project increased the resources that community family planning agencies devoted to teenage services, teenagers in targeted communities showed no generalized improvement in rates of pregnancy and childbearing, in knowledge or use of clinic services, or in attitudes toward contraception compared with those of teenagers in the entire c...