Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, UCL Medical School, London
Ex – Medical Director, Margaret Pyke Family Planning Centre, London
(United Kingdom)
In 1992 John Guillebaud (MA, FRCSE, FRCOG, MFFP) was appointed by University College, London as Professor (now Emeritus) of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, the world’s first practising gynaecologist to be given a personal chair in the specialty. His clinical, teaching and research work is now in Oxford (at the Elliot-Smith Vasectomy Clinic, Churchill Hospital and the Alec Turnbull Reproductive Health Clinic, Radcliffe Infirmary).
As a Trustee of the Margaret Pyke Memorial Trust he also maintains a link with the Centre, of which he is the former Medical Director. Margaret Pyke was the first Chairman of the UK Family Planning Association and a pioneer of the family planning movement. The centre provides a comprehensive publicly funded one-stop reproductive health service. Hundreds of medical students, doctors and nurses are trained each year at the Centre, and new methods of birth control are investigated with the help of the associated Trust.
Professor Guillebaud’s family are Huguenots who came to England more than 300 years ago, and so he retains the French name as it has always been spelled: it is pronounced in two syllables quite simply as “gil-boe”. He was born in Burundi, Africa, brought up in Rwanda, and educated in Uganda, Kenya and Britain.
Believing with UNICEF that globally “family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other technology now available to the human race”, he is frequently called on as a consultant on reproductive health issues by WHO and other international and national bodies.
He has travelled to every continent promoting planned parenthood and concern for the environment, and in 1993 received the prestigious Evian/Birthright Health Award “for his tireless campaigning on overpopulation: human numbers, a crucial factor in meeting human needs on a finite planet”. He proposed and co-ordinated the Environment Time Capsule project based at Kew Gardens.
Professor Guillebaud has authored or co-authored seven books and more than 300 other publications for the medical profession and general public on issues relating to birth control, reproductive health, population and environmental sustainability.