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> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher? One of r
by pawelduda 8mo ago
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoThat’s looking at history through a modern lens. The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex. They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
- pawelduda 8mo agoThis is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
- kixiQu 8mo agoIt's more complicated than that. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
- Balgair 8mo agoTLDR: Peasants could expect between 8-12 pregnancies, with 2 (!) surviving to adulthood. Christ, that is a lot of dead children for every woman. Your heart just breaks over and over.