Historical note: How bringing women's health advocacy groups to WHO helped change the research agenda

The politics of population control and its sometimes coercive methods in developing countries documented during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, gave rise to strong opposition by women's groups, and put into question the safety of contraceptive methods that were being developed and introduced into countries. In 1991, the Special Programme on Human Reproduction at the World Health Organization, a research programme focused on development of new methods and safety assessments of existing fertility regulation methods, started a process of “dialogue” meetings between scientists and women's health advocacy groups which lasted for nearly a decade. This paper describes the process of these meetings and what they achieved in terms of bringing new or different research topics into the agenda, and some of the actions taken as a result.