[5]: 37  The League's constitution stated its purpose as: (1) To aid in the preparation, promotion, enactment and enforcement of legislative measures designed to provide for the improvement of the human stock by the selective sterilization of the mentally defective and of those afflicted with inherited or inheritable physical disease; (2) To conduct educational activities designed to develop and sustain public opinion in support of the measures required to make effective the above purpose; (3) To collect, compile and publish statistical, medical, economic and social data relative to the extent, causes and consequence of the mental and physical defects, which, when transmitted from one generation to another, impair the racial stock; (4) To raise and administer funds for carrying out the purposes of the League.

Rather than improvement of the genetic stock, Birthright reframed its goal as protecting the country's children, and ensuring they were born and raised under proper conditions.

[5]: 5  In the same year, the Manhattan studio at the New York Academy of Medicine of Robert Latou Dickinson, who had been a member since 1943 and became the first chairman of the organization's medical and scientific committee in 1949, served as new headquarters.

[citation needed] In the early 1970s, AVS and its allies in the family planning movement launched an intensive campaign to promote sterilization.

[8] AVS also worked to establish the first informed consent and client-counselling components in health services and produced one of the first manuals on family planning counselling.

[11] In the changing atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the importance of population control and family planning in the Third World for U.S. foreign policy was being stressed, AVS became in 1972 for the first time the recipient of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

[12] In the early 1970s, AVS supported the work of surgeons who were developing a new approach to tubal ligation (female surgical sterilization) called "minilaparotomy", or "minilap".

[15] AVSC launched an international postabortion care (PAC) program in 1993 to reduce injury and death among women who undergo unsafe abortions.

[20] With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AVSC partnered with four other international agencies in 1999 to launch the Alliance for Cervical Cancer Prevention (ACCP).

To reflect its expansion beyond sterilization, in 2001 the organization changed its name to EngenderHealth, added the tagline "Improving Women's Health Worldwide", and introduced a new logo.

[12] In recognition of this honor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared July 1, 2002, as "EngenderHealth Day" in New York City, and presented a certificate to the organization.

With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), EngenderHealth became the managing partner of the large-scale ACQUIRE Project (which stood for "Access, Quality, and Use in Reproductive Health") in 2003.

This global project worked in more than 20 countries around the world to improve family planning, maternal health, and post-abortion care services.

Today, MenEngage works around the world to raise awareness and support initiatives that reduce gender-based violence, with additional partnership from the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Save the Children, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), the White Ribbon Campaign, Sonke Gender Justice, and several other organizations.

In 2006, in partnership with the Population Council, Ipas, Marie Stopes International, Willows Foundation, and the Ministry of Health in Ghana to launch the R3M Program: Reducing Maternal Morbidity and Mortality.

A second USAID-funded project worked to expand HIV prevention services for the most at-risk population in urban areas of Ethiopia.

[30] EngenderHealth was one of several nonprofits mentioned in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a best-selling book written by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and published in September 2009.