Family planning typically involves regulating the number of children in a family and their spacing by practicing contraception and other means of birth control. Family planning enables parents to freely and responsibly decide when and how many children they are going to have and to have available the information and the means to carry out their plan. It also enables parents to have available to them all the safe and effective means of contraception so that they can act according to their decisions. With this information, they can be aware of the costs of the various means of contraception, be more knowledgeable about those means and have greater support of their extended family members as well as potentially the wider community.
Because of contraceptive technology, couples are deciding to have children at younger and older ages and it is important that such decisions can be made freely knowing all the consequences both long and short-term for both the children and the parents. There still remain many women and families who want to control the number of children they have or space out their pregnancies but do not have the means or information to do so.
Family planning when done in a larger context can also be used to control population growth. Family planning services were first attempted with private groups but there was strong opposition to them. Margaret Sanger from New York City was a nurse who was able to establish the first birth control clinic in the United States in the early 1900s at a time when publishing and distributing information on contraception was illegal. Others such as Marie Stopes in England and Dhanvanthis Rama Rau in India followed suit with starting clinics for family planning, birth control and health care in their respective countries. Today, national polices have been established by many countries and the use of public family services is encouraged.











