I read a few facts (at least I assume they are facts, they came from the internet after all) about pregnancy in pre-medical times.
3/4 of conceived eggs died before the baby was born
1/2 of all children born died before they reached reproductive age
So that works out to 8 conceptions to get one kid who can reproduce. You need a TFR (number of children born per woman) of 2 just to keep population stable (technically 4, since half will die), which means a woman had to be pregnant 16 times just to have 2 kids reach reproductive age.
Considering that in societies with malnutrition, I don’t think menarche starts until age 15 or so, that would mean getting pregnant almost constantly. Plus a life of malnutrition and hard labor ages you faster, wouldn’t the women reach menopause earlier (or at the very least be less capable of surviving another pregnancy)?
How long after miscarriage can a woman get pregnant again? Could a woman’s body handle being pregnant 20 times? Among the women I’ve known just doing it once or twice with medicine seemed pretty trying physical and mentally. Wouldn’t almost every woman have to undergo near constant pregnancy just to keep the species alive pre-medicine?
Bill Bryson looks into “half of all children died as children” line in his book At Home. The best research seems to agree that while the percentage who died in childhood was high, it did not reach one half in most cases. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent is a better estimate.
A fertilised ovum failing to implant is not a miscarriage, and that is the source of almost all the 3/4 of conceived eggs died before the baby was born. As** CurtC **notes, even under optimal conditions, it is expected that over half of all conceived eggs to fail to implant and die before the baby was born.
And to answer the question, when a zygote fails too implant the effect is exactly the same as if the zygote were not fertilised. Menstruation ensues and the woman can normally fall pregnant within 15 days.
This is the main flaw in your reasoning. You have assumed that “3/4 of conceived eggs died before the baby was born” means that the event occurs after several months of sustaining a pregnancy. That isn’t the case. Of that 75%, 50% will simply be a failed implantation and the woman will be utterly unaware that fertilisation even occurred. I don;t have hard figures to hand, but I suspect that a further 15-20% will abort within 2 weeks of implantation, so once again, the woman will be unaware of implantation and pregnancy will be possible again within a month.
As for how many children died before adulthood, we will never know the true answer because infanticide rates were very high, but were rarely recorded or discussed in Christian Europe. Based on records of deaths of baptised infants and graveyard surveys, the rate is certainly below 50%, but nobody baptises an infant they intend to expose and few people bury an infant that they killed.
Based on extrapolated data, the rate of infanticide may have been as high as 75% of all births. That extrapolated data comes form such sources as comparison with contemporary societies where infanticide had less of a stigma (eg China, India) and anecdotes such as orphanages and foundling refuges being oversubscribed at least ten-fold in Europe.
Which also ties into your question. People are much more likely to kill an infant when the family is already too large. this also applies to other less direct forms of infanticide such as neglect. Effectively, this means that a most of the children who died before adulthood were born to women who already had large numbers of children. So the reproduction rate wasn’t really an issue.
This assumes that all your assumptions are always true, and I can see at least one that isn’t - malnutrition and hard labour is not the constant default state of mankind.
I don’t see why its necessarily a “capitalist” viewpoint to think so, certainly the tropes of the Middle Ages being a constant “Dark Age” isn’t unknown amongst liberals either.
My Grandmother was one of 14 children (born between 1880 and 1900), 12 of whom lived to adulthood, 1 died in her 20’s, 6 lived into their 80’s, and 1 to 103.
They were not an unusual family of that time in rural England.
Well, I guess in families with a history in organized labor, it takes the form of “before unions/FDR.”
The point is that some moderns have an exaggerated idea of how horrible pre-industrial society was. The Industrial Revolution was genuinely horrifying, but in comparison to the present era, the pre-industrial West mostly suffered from worse medical knowledge and therefore worse medical care. Food was not that much worse on balance, and could be better in many places. Freshwater sources were often less polluted due to less industrialization and lower population. It wasn’t a horrorshow in general outside of wars, famines, and various slavery/worker oppression movements.
When you can name somewhere that had an average height equivalent to the current one, I will give that some credence. Before the modern era, farmers everywhere were stunted due to regular famine and chronic malnutrition.
Can you name any river in Western Europe that was less polluted in 1615 than it is in 2015?
There is a reason that faecal diseases like cholera, polio and thyphoid were ubiquitous in the pre-modern world. And why the claim that engineers have saved more lives than doctors is so easy to establish. Villages were almost always built on their water sources, which was also the sewer.
Medieval rivers weren’t contaminated with pesticides, but being contaminated with sewage doesn’t make them any cleaner.
Hunter gatherers may have had a fairly good diet and not worked too hard, although the life is such that it’s hard to find *anybody *who adopts such a lifestyle by choice, which speaks volumes. But once farming took over, people lives were not particularly nice, and malnutrition and disease made it a horror show by the standards you and I are used to. We consider it tragedy when a disease outbreak kills 0.01% of the population. For most of the history of civilisation, diseases killing ten times that number were an annual event.