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Notes -
We've discussed the past being a foreign country and we've discussed fertility, a small intersection of both:
In the book A Good Time to Be Born, by Dr Perri Klass, she starts with establishing that child mortality was just a normal part of life. I borrowed it as an ebook so I'm just going to quote the blurb instead
But I do remember from reading the book how one of the founding fathers wrote to comfort his wife that losing a child is part of the universal human condition that everyone gets to experience, a line of thinking very similar to what I've heard in the modern era about losing a parent ("joining the world's largest suckiest club")
In Chaim Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, he comments in a casual throwaway line that his mother had 15 children and 12 survived to adolescence which was considered very impressive and unusual.
He also comments, in a longer paragraph, that for years his mother was only ever pregnant or nursing. She wasn't really a full human presence in his life, she was exhausted and physically ill basically all the time. Then she hit menopause, and suddenly he discovered that his mother was an entire interesting person he could and did have real conversations with.
Human have obviously always been K strategists — we have the highest parental investment needs of any species (only elephants, great apes, and orcas could plausibly be offered as counterexamples if you want to get argumentative about this statement, and the most I'm willing to concede is that they come close¹).
However, there used to be a need for what I guess I'll call a little bit of r strategy in the k strategy. Children just died too much for you to viably have only a few of them, you risked the extermination of your gene line that way.
Nowadays losing a child isn't considered a basic part of life everyone goes through. It's considered a rare and unusually tragic event.
It therefore shouldn't be surprising if in high fertility societies the number of total births has gone down— this is re discussion below that even highly religious populations have had their tfr go down.
Obviously another large factor is reliable birth control enabling the religious to reliably space births — birth control methods have existed for millenia but after silphium went extinct and before rubber (1839) or better yet latex (1920s) condoms (let alone the pill in the 1950s) the available options were mostly significantly less reliable barrier methods or things like nursing sometimes being a contraceptive for some people. Latex condoms do align closely with when birth rates dropped², but so does the drop in child mortality.
But I do think — again, limiting myself to societies that are high fertility, not the below 3 ones — that when every child is near guaranteed to survive you have fewer of them.
¹Actually I have now distracted myself into a side tangent, so here's fertility numbers for the other high investment species from Claude:
Elephants: Females typically have 4-6 calves over their lifetime. Gestation is 22 months, and they usually wait 4-5 years between births while nursing and caring for the previous calf Reproductive lifespan spans roughly ages 10-50
Orangutans: Females typically have 3-4 offspring in their lifetime. They have the longest interbirth interval of any mammal - usually 7-9 years between births.
Orcas: Females typically have 4-6 calves over their lifetime. They reproduce between roughly ages 10-40, with 3-5 year intervals between births. They can live into their 80s or 90s but stop reproducing around age 40 (menopause)
² Claude again:
It doesn't neatly correlate with child mortality or birth control methods, the great depression dip is evidence for the "it's the economy stupid" people who think the reason is children are too expensive but maybe just stressful time periods in general do that?
I agree that the isolated metric of TFR doesn't do a good job of explaining the problem. Your excellent post outlines how declining birthrates, much like declining homicide rates, are largely explained by better healthcare and general sanitation, much less than a shift in human behavior.
But time of first birth reveals the change with higher fidelity. And this is the real problem. People - women - are having their first child later and later. This raises the risk of complications and lowers the probability of multiple births, especially 3 or more which you need a fair amount of to get total TFR to 2.3ish or so.
The primary explanatory factors for this is probably a mixture of careerism, financial stability necessities (or perceived necessities), and a generally higher tolerance for casual relationships in the late teens to early 20s. There's a lot of culture war embedded in those factors - I'll let the Mottizens arm themselves however they like.
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