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Abstract

This article traces the growth of a birth control campaign in Jamaica in 1938 and the opposition to that movement which prevented it from becoming government policy in the following decades.It then analyses the work of the private Jamaica Birth Control League, which set up the island's first clinic in 1939. Although the League reached only a small portion of the population, their records provide a window into women's reproductive lives, the demand for birth control, and local networks of contraceptive information. The paper concludes by considering the status of family planning on the island in the immediate post-independence era.

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