= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Azathoth123 comments on Crossing the History-Lessons Threshold - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (65)
My understanding is that the affluence the Empire afforded them lead to Rome (and much of Italy) experiencing a demographic transition similar to the one modern developed nations are experiencing.
But we did it with effective birth control and safe abortions. What did Rome use? Was it infanticide?
From Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms:
"The intervening factor that kept [Roman] Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8."
Well, condoms go back to ancient Egypt.
That's not quite accurate. The crucial change was that people stopped wanting to have as many children. Also in both cases late marriage played a big role.
This is far from saying they were comfortable, effective or easy enough to manufacture to be widely in use.
Effective birth control and safe abortions are an easy and threshold lowering means to that end.
The demographic transition is first observed in the 18th century, without what people usually think of as "effective birth control and safe abortions."
What do you think caused it?
As it happens I recently came across a blog post/essay on this very topic.
Methods used to limit fertility historically 1: Non-penetrative intercourse. Oral isn't new, and is very reliable. 2: very late marriages. 3: Prostitution and /unsafe/ abortions. (this is a really depressing bit of history...)
I've seen the assertion that Rome had an effective birth control drug which they drove to extinction. Not sure how much I believe this.
"It was said that it could be used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, aches and pains, warts, and all kinds of maladies." :)
I've never heard of woo contraceptives. Getting pregnant isn't susceptible to the placebo effect, and its pretty obvious when it doesn't work.
Getting pregnant may be more difficult than you think. Even if there's no placebo, there's still confirmation and disconfirmation bias and argument from authority i.e. doctors. Perhaps it wasn't marketed as a perfectly reliable contraceptive and therefore noticing that it doesn't work would have been more difficult. Medical authorities could explain the failures away with the phases of the moon or the will of the gods or something similarly silly.