Fifty years of legal contraception in France:diffusion, medicalization, feminization

By legalizing access to “anti-conceptional” methods, France’s Neuwirth Law paved the way for the diffusion of the contraceptive pill and the IUD, and for the medicalization of contraception. The birth control pill is now the most widely used method in France, though in third place at the international level, behind male and female sterilization, and the IUD. Since 2012 and the “pill scare” around new generations of birth control pills, pill use has decreased in France in favour of other methods, though the pill is still most commonly used. The recent controversy around
the pill has opened up critical perspectives on the French contraceptive model, which may evolve toward more equal sharing of the responsibility for contraception between men and women.