Leaving Mrs T. after further discussion and reassurance, the doctor felt conscious of grief shared and explanations given. She felt fairly confident that in time the patient would recover from her loss, and that perhaps longstanding psychosexual unhappiness had been avoided. Another important group of women are those who have no current partner because the [...]
Some infertility tests such as the postcoital test, or the need to have intercourse on specific days, can result in varying degrees of impotence. Longer lasting episodes have been seen to occur following the discovery of azoospermia. Ambivalence about the wish for a baby, which has already been described in women and in couples, may [...]
This is often seen in the very young or women of strong religious beliefs, but can be seen in other women. Miss G. is a Moslem woman of 28 years born in this country of Arabic parents. This would be her fourth abortion. On the last occasion she had discontinued the injectable contraceptive, medroxyprogesterone, because [...]
When they first attend, the majority of teenagers have already been sexually active, for a varying period of time, usually using condoms for contraception, at least on some occasions. They come saying they want a safer method and most are hoping for the combined oral contraceptive (COC). The second commonest group, again sexually active, are [...]
Shame and guilt are important emotions in contraceptive practice and are often related to past sexual relationships and behaviour. A previous unintended pregnancy and abortion do not necessarily lead to more careful use of contraception, as there may be an unconscious wish to deny what happened and to get pregnant again to make some kind [...]
This contains only the progesterone component and in lesser dose than is used in the combined Pill. Although regarded as very safe medically it is less effective than the combined Pill, having a failure rate of 2 to 3 per 100 woman years, but since fertility effectively declines with age, women of 40 years and [...]
There is nothing magical about the choice of position for intercourse. There is no virtue whatsoever in experimenting for the sake of it if you are both happy with the way things are. Problems arise when one partner is happy with the status quo and the other wants more variety. There is only one way [...]
This collection of mental, physical and emotional syndromes occurs in about a third of all women of child-bearing age. More than a hundred signs and symptoms have been reported in the medical literature but this very woolliness has made many men suspicious of the whole subject. To those women who suffer from PMS things are [...]
Marriage has many enemies today. The politicians and legislators formalise it and constrain it; the churches impose rules to try to regulate it yet few adherents to their faiths live by them; and so on. The greatest of all enemies of marriage is society itself. In a world in which we change our cars every [...]
In spite of all these possible set-backs engagement is still very much the norm though the form it takes can vary. Only about 4 per cent of those who marry have never been engaged at all but there are ‘shades’ of engagement between this and marriage. Engagements can be formal, with a notice in the [...]