Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Zaragoza.

All these years I've stayed at home while you had all your fun.

And every year that's gone by another baby's come, there's going to be some changes made right here on nursery hill you set this chicken your last time

because now i've got the pill the pill it's the oral contraceptive that gave birth to an economic

revolution freeing women up to pursue education and careers. But is their unfinished

business in Africa? I had an early pregnancy. I then decided to become a community health promoter

to ensure that girls don't fall into the same mistake. And whatever happened to that male

pill we were promised. We're looking at 10 years for something that is very far along in the

pipeline. Since I've got the pill. The economics of fertility coming up here in this edition of

Business Daily from the BBC. Birth control has a long and strange history. In ancient Egypt,

women would mix honey, sodium carbonate and crocodile dung

and use it as a pessory. Casanova, writing in the late 18th century, advises using a cervical

cap made from half a lemon. So when the far more reliable oral contraceptive pill came along,

well, it had profound social and economic consequences.

Just look at American University admissions from the 1970s. The proportion of female students

studying subjects such as medicine and law rose dramatically. The link is clear. Once women can control

their fertility, they're able to invest in their careers.

These days, it's widely accepted that in most poor countries, lower fertility is good for economic

growth. More on that in just a moment. First, though, over to Marilyn Druce. She's a professor

of endocrinology, an expert in hormones at Barts and the London School of Medicine.

In around the 1930s, it became apparent that you could give high doses of progesterone in order

to suppress ovulation. And really, it was in the 50s that the pharmaceutical industries

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