To commemorate international AIDS awareness day on 1st December 2005, a 67-metre pink condom was made and placed over the Obelisco (obelisk) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On 1st December 2003, Benetton in collaboration with ACT UP Paris placed a giant condom (22 metres high and 3.5 wide) on the obelisk in Place de la Concorde in Central Paris.

Manufactured by Church & Dwight Inc., Co., Trojan Magnum XL condoms are 30% larger than standard condoms.

The Australian Family Planning Association was started in 1926, four years before the creation of a similar body in the UK. As with other FPAs, the Australian organisation was on a voluntary basis.

The earliest published recommendation of sterilisation on eugenic grounds is that of a Swiss, Dr. August Forel, in 1892. It was such early agitation that led up to the European enthusiasm for sterilisation in the nineteen-thirties.

Francis Place, born in Drury Lane in 1771 began the birth control movement in Britain in 1823. After immense early struggles he managed to become a prosperous tradesman, expressing the ambition that he would retire at forty-five and devote himself to politics. His commitment to birth control was only one facet of his deep social and political involvement in reformist philosophy on several fronts.

The condom was probably first used in England, as in much of the rest of Europe, in the seventeenth-century. A witness before the first English Birthrate Commission testified that condoms were in use in London at the time of the Great Fire (1666).

It is likely that the first tribes engaging in warfare on a systematic basis indulged in castration of defeated foes on a grand scale. It is common knowledge that ancient nations regarded a collection of male testicles as a sign of a warrior's bravery and skill in combat; and foreskins were given in tribute in biblical times to signal the defeat of an enemy. According to Schurig's Gynocologia, the legendary Syrian queen Semiramis was the first practitioner of mass castration. According to one theory she had men so mutilated in order to prevent opposition

Various figures have been given for failure rates for contraceptive measures of various sorts. Highest estimates have been quoted as follows (figures for pregnancies/100 woman-years of exposure):

• pill 2.0
• condom 11.1
• diaphragm and jelly 17.5
• withdrawal 20.0
• safe period 35.0
• foaming tablets, douching 42.8

Maurice Meltzer, writing in 1928, has declared that four men - Guyon, Burket, Hilton, and Harrison - performed vasectomies between 1885 and 1896; but doubt has been expressed about this claim. Guyon wrote of his experiences with "resection of the vasa deferentia" in 1895 and it is clear that Isnardi performed vasectomies in 1896, but the first human vasectomies were performed either by Harrison in London (possibly as early as 1893) or by Lennander in Uppsala, Sweden (in 1894).

The first birth control clinic in the world was opened in Holland in 1882 under the auspices of the Nieuw Malthusiaanschen Bond (the Dutch Malthusian League). The League was founded in 1881 - and was immediately opposed by the medical profession! Two doctors, however, joined the organisation in the early days - Dr. de Rooy (1881) and Dr. Aletta Jacobs (1882), the first woman to become medically qualified in Holland. From 1883 Dr. Jacobs held a clinic twice a week to give advice on infant welfare to working-class women. Soon she became

Following the work of Chang and Djerassi and others, Gregory Pincus, the Director of the Worcester Foundation for experimental Biology had developed an effective contraceptive pill by 1957. The Pincus team, including Chang, began a systematic study, in the nineteen-fifties, of more than two hundred substances with varying effects on such things as ovulation, menstruation, and conception. One substance gestagen type, called "norethynodrel," formed the basis of the first large-scale trial of the contraceptive pill, a trial carried out in Puerto Rico in 1956.