I imagine nobody has this data, but presumably the correlation between birth control / women’s empowerment and lower birth rates is because maybe most humans were conceived unintentionally? Like, what’s the moral implications of most people being accidents, is that a massively taboo topic or is it just so uninteresting that nobody talks about it?
I’d assume that most people who are married (marriage is a pretty old and widespread institution, even if the details differ between cultures) expect at least some children, even if they don’t have much control about the exact times and numbers.
But there is a difference between a married couple intentionally creating a large family and a married couple that likes to fuck and didn’t intend to marry each other in the first place until a baby came along.
Right, so I guess the question I have is, did the desired number of kids go down, or did everyone pre-1850s just put up with having more kids than they wanted? How many kids do people want to have?
Pre 1850s, in most cases, you needed to have lots of offspring regardless of wanting them or not… Mortality was high.
Not sure how it was elsewhere but where I live people usually had more kids because there were no retirement and once your body was weak you needed someone to provide for you. And more children = better chance of providing for their parents.