I attended an international family planning meeting in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, in 1984. At that time we were living just a short plane ride away in Puerto Rico.
The meeting was full of people from different countries speaking different languages and was an excellent opportunity to make connections in the family planning world. One person was outstanding.
I was chatting with someone one afternoon and mentioned that I was tired and was headed back to our hotel to take a nap. “You should stay and listen to the next speaker, Malcolm Potts. He is amazing, mixing a lot of knowledge with a bunch of British humor”.
I took their advice, and was not disappointed. Dr. Potts was a world leader in family planning. He died this spring at age 90.
Potts was an innovator. He helped to start the first clinic in Cambridge, England, that offered birth control to young people. He was also the first director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. He collaborated with Dr. Karman, a psychologist, to develop a simple technique for treating miscarriages and performing early abortions. It uses a flexible cannula with vacuum created by a syringe, thus it is especially useful in places where there is no electricity. Although I learned the Karman method long ago, only by reading it in an obituary of Malcolm’s did I realize that he had aided in its invention.
Potts told me how he had helped with another innovation. The work of Henry David, a psychologist, is often quoted to help justify abortion. David studied children born to women twice denied abortion for the same pregnancy. He followed these kids for 20 or more years. The studies unequivocally showed that the children of unwanted pregnancies did not do as well as matched controls. Potts told me that it was he who suggested David study unintended pregnancies in Prague, Czech Republic, because they had stringent laws limiting who could have an abortion at that time.
In 1984 I interviewed for a job where Potts was the director. It had been called the “International Fertility Research Program”. Potts had realized that the name was long and might prejudice some people against the organization, so had it changed to the more copacetic “Family Health International”.
More recently Potts was the inaugural director of the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability, and held an endowed chair at the Berkeley School of Public Health. He was an admired professor and used his imagination to innovate: his nonprofit, OASIS, advances education and choice for women and girls in the African Sahel. He also cofounded a company that is trying to bring birth control pills to the marketplace without the need for a prescription.
My favorite saying of Potts dates from the era when tobacco was sold in vending machines: “Birth control pills should be available in vending machines and cigarets only by prescription.” His wish has come partly true—now cigaret sales are much more restricted and reproductive health materials are available in vending machines. Many college campuses have machines that dispense condoms, pregnancy tests, emergency contraceptive pills and now, even Opill, the new over-the-counter birth control pill without estrogen (see photo above).
Potts was a pioneer in lowering barriers to reproductive health care. For instance, he set up a clinic at a central train station in India to perform vasectomies because people feared hospitals. He was known for this sort of imaginative, out-of-the-box thinking.
One of his coworkers, Alisha Graves, stated that Potts believed “We really have to trust that women are doing the best things for themselves and their families.” It took me years to come to the same conclusion.
© Richard Grossman MD, 2025