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.

Hercules Saxonia recalled, in 1597, that Fallopius had invented the linen condom and further suggested that it could be improved by soaking it in a chemical solution several times and allowing it to dry in the shade. While it is conceded that Fallopius was one of the first to mention the sheath or condom it is also stressed that such a device was probably invented in many different parts of the world at different times. It is possible that sheaths of various types were used in ancient Rome - there is a legend, related by Antoninus Liberalis, of a goat's bladder

India has been represented as the home of vasectomy, the Indian government claiming to have performed upwards of 8,000,000 sterilisation operations of which more than eighty per cent are vasectomies. The need for extensive birth control in India is evidenced by the fact that in a population of nearly six hundred million the population is growing at the rate of up to 14,000,000 every year. In the India of today there are around 120,000,000 married women of reproductive age and the Indian government is pledged to provide contraceptive services of some kind to all of them.

Soranus (A.D. 98-138) was a Greek physician who studied in Alexandria and later practised in Rome under Hadrian. He found enough time to write forty books or so. In his "Gynaecology" he suggests"...that a woman ought, in the moment during coitus when the man ejaculates his sperm, to hold her breath, draw her body back a little so that the semen cannot penetrate into the os uteri, then immediately get up and sit down with bent knees, and in this position, provoke sneezes" (quoted by S. Green, "The Curious History".) Thus, it is hoped, she will avoid conception.

A rich market for the pill manufacturers is Australasia, where around one million women "contracept orally" - a figure that represents more than one third of the women of childbearing age. The pill is coming to be regarded as one of a woman's natural entitlements. In November 1969 a news sheet was circulated amongst British drug firms stating that a Melbourne bride-to-be, who had hurt her leg in a car crash, had been awarded £230 by a court, because the risk of thrombosis probably meant she would never be able to take the pill!

In Greek mythology the sovereign Uranus, the god of heaven, imprisoned his sons as soon as they were born so that they could not seize his power. The strongest and youngest son, Cronos, under the influence of Gaea, his mother, castrated his father and threw his genitals into the sea.

The first Family Planning Association on the American continent was created in 1917, despite the lingering influence of Comstock, hostile contraceptive legislation in many states, etc.

There has been immense debate about the origin of the word condom. One suggestion was that there was a Dr. (or Colonel) Condom (or Condum, Condon, or Conton) - a physician at the court of Charles II - who invented the device. The word first appeared in print in a poem written in 1706 - "A Scots Answer to a British Vision," which refers to contemporary instruments for combating venereal disease (Sirenge and Condum/Come both in Request).

In 1886 Bardenheurer was experimenting with methods of restoring continuity between the vas deferens and the epididymus in cases of blockage through disease or injury. The first description of a feasible operation is credited to Martin in an article in the "University of Pennsylvania Medical Bulletin" in 1902. Two Italians, Penzo and Gutti, wrote on the subject in 1903 and 1905, while Swinbourne, an American claimed success in 1910 in one of five cases, using Martin's technique. The first British report is a note by Wheeler, of Dublin, in 1914. The first

Fragments of Egyptian papyri, found at Kahun in El Faiyum in 1889, are the oldest medical literature that has come down to us from antiquity. They reveal that upper class Egyptian women of the Twelfth Dynasty, about 1850 B.C., used crocodile dung as a pessary, irrigated the vagina with honey and natron (native sesquicarbonate of soda), and inserted a gum-like substance in the vagina. Though elephant's dung was later substituted for that of the crocodile, a similar prescription was used in various places for some three thousand years. It is likely that