Hardly. Their existing skills will be critical to rebuild society and to pass on to others. There will simply be other priorities over re-establishing contraceptive supplies (and by the same token, other priorities over re-establishing Viagra supplies), and I don’t know where you got the idea that existing stocks would be destroyed - certainly from nothing I wrote.
Can we hook up your leg to a generator after the calamity? Your knee-jerking should be good for 50 kilowatts, at least.
Because we are talking about reducing women to slavery as brood mares; of forcing children upon them until it kills them. You and the others talking about forcing women have children may not use words like slavery, but that is in effect what you are talking about. Men willing to do that would hardly allow the existence of any form of birth control.
Heh, maybe you are, but I wasn’t.
Polio would likely only be a big deal for unvaccinated adults while water supplies are unsanitary and everyone AFTER the water supplies were sanitary; the polio epidemics as we think of them, with people in iron lungs and such, were primarily a 20th century thing brought ON by the vast improvements to sanitation and drinking water. (cite: http://www.childrenshospital.org/research/Site2029/mainpageS2029P6sublevel7Flevel14.html)
Like **mosier ** said, the germ theory of disease would be the number one thing we’d want to keep hold of- most of modern medicine is derived from it, or at least the part keeping us significantly in better shape than the 1500s. Canned food, sanitary water, antibiotics and antiseptics, antiseptic surgery, etc… all stem from it.
The top 3 things to rebuild/keep would be:
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Public sanitation - i.e. sewers and water being separated, clean water, garbage removal, etc…
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Antiseptic surgery and wound treatment. I’d think carbolic acid, ethanol(duh!) and phenol might be relatively easy to synthesize with 1500s era equipment, especially if we knew how to do it.
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Canning food. While not strictly speaking a healthcare advance, it would go a LONG, LONG way toward having nutritious food supplies over the winter that salting and smoking meat wouldn’t provide.
I don’t think birth control would be high on anyone’s list, even the women, because in such a society, humanity would have become closer to a r-strategy species than we currently are. In other words, in order to be successful as a family/clan/village or whatever, large numbers of offspring would be advantageous. It was the way things were until relatively recently- families were big predominantly because infant mortality was high, and having lots of kids meant more labor on the farm & more people to fight if the tribe had a conflict.
Non-mechanized agrarian societies don’t work well with only children, so birth control wouldn’t be a priority.
Vaccination, at least until we rebuild cities and can get a sustaining pool of infection for the common diseases.
Antibiotics after that.
This is assuming we have established clean drinking water, and sanitary disposal of sewage.
Regards,
Shodan
Vaccines against the big childhood killers (and causes of infertility and disability) like measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and polio. Communicable diseases like TB and malaria might become common again.
It would also probably be a good idea to have medicines for common chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes and epilepsy, simply because some of the people with those conditions might be very useful to keep around for their skills. Easy enough to say that those conditions will have to be low priority, but if the only doctor in the neighbourhood has diabetes then it’ll be essential to keep him alive at least long enough to train others up.
Birth control would be useful even in a world where maximum repopulation is the aim, because the aim isn’t more babies - it’s more surviving adults.
Childbirth and pregnancy are risky to the mother, and a child with a living mother has a much better chance of survival than a child orphaned when its mother dies giving birth to their younger sibling. Larger age gaps (like, three or four years) would also help with survival in a lot of ways - the woman would only be breastfeeding one child at a time, the older child would be more independant, the next oldest child would be able to help with the baby, etc etc.
Yes, the woman could just not have penetrative sex - but that’s assuming that the woman has full choice over when she has sex. Regular(ish) sex also helps with pair bonding.
Besides, contraceptives would probably be one of the easier drugs to manufacture once current supplies run out or go too far out of date to be effective.
Has anyone mentioned the part about how sperm is an essential ingredient in making babies?
How about in your post-apocalyptic world, we ask the men to take a 50% share in responsibility for contraception, even if that means they can’t spray ejaculate wherever they like?
Have you ever been in charge of a newborn? Let alone a string of newborn, toddler, preschooler, and child the way you’re suggesting? There’s no time to do anything else. New parents are short on the most basic of activities, like sleep. They sure as hell won’t have time to transcribe chemical formulae, medical procedures, or Shakespearean sonnets. They’ll be breastfeeding, changing diapers, feeding the ones no longer on the breast, corralling all the kids that can walk, taking care of sick ones, keeping the healthy ones out of the poison ivy, and if they’re lucky, cooking some food for themselves.
Babies take an enormous amount of work. Until the advent of reliable birth control, the only women who could work or study outside the home were wealth enough to hire wet nurses. Never mind the inevitable shift in philosophy when you put the existence of fresh babies over the importance of women’s humanitarian rights.
If any human population were to survive a cataclysmic event, our problem wouldn’t be repopulating. We can do and have done that thousands of times over. The problem will be refusing to go down the same overpopulated path that got us there in the first place.
We don’t even have that now. I have no illusions of getting it after the apocalypse.
Anyway, true enough that survival of adults and normalization (to the extent possible) of critical infrastructure, i.e. sewage and irrigation and such, should take priority over childrearing, but if I’m required to make hard choices about priorities, some things are simply more important than others. It would be great if survivors could have the same basic set of medications and devices, but if we dig out a medicine factory and we have to choose between making antibiotics and making oral contrraceptives, I’ll have to go with the former. If we dig out a rubber factory and we have to choose between making tents and raincoats vs. making condoms, I again have to go with the former.
Anyone who assumes this is because deep down I’m pro-life and anti-woman is foolish.
Whether we have it now or not is not the question. The question is whether or not we can prioritize appropriately during a collapse of civilization. That is based entirely on whether or not others - such as yourself - are willing to take up their fair share of the burden instead of pushing it entirely off onto others while claiming pragmatics.
Your views, however, are not pragmatic. Childcare is a huge drain on resource - far, far greater than what would be needed to establish reliable birth control. Childcare would be a much greater hindrance to infrastructure recovery than a condom hunt or oral contraceptive manufacture.
In fact, we’d be better off keeping the birth rate as low as possible for the first five years or so after a catastrophe, if we wanted any chance of rebuilding civilization.
Well, the trouble is until we flesh out this apocalyptic crisis at least a little, we don’t really have any idea what’ll be possible or feasible. My assumption has been that I have to prioritize and pick something that’ll save the lives of adults in the here-and-now (even if it means some unwanted pregnancies), because every lost adult means lost skills and education.
Just for laughs, let’s say the island of Montreal (499 square kilometers, ~1.8 million population, almost entirely urbanized and sub-urbanized) is the sole untouched territory amid a worldwide H1N1 pandemic that has killed everyone else everywhere. At the very least, there are a lot of condoms available (why anyone would assume existing stocks would be destroyed escapes me) to take up the short-term demand, while we concentrate on the more critical aspects of securing fresh water and a food supply and making sure the sewage system at least limps along.
If for some reason Montrealers are immune and can make foraging runs into the neighboring ghost towns, I think we might do all right for a while.
I agree. What the heck does it mean, “If civilization collapses”? What the heck does it mean to return to the technology of the 1500s, only with the science of the 2000s?
We have the technology of 2009. Even with a global economic collapse, a global war, a global pandemic, or an asteroid strike, we’re not going to return to the technology of the 1500s. You simply can’t turn a 21st century cubicle worker into a 15th century subsistence farmer. You might be able to turn them into a 21st century subsistence farmer, maybe. But that’s not the same.
I never said technology (or science for that matter) of 1500, I said lifestyle implying the levels of resources and wealth of that period. Our civilization is very interdependent. If a meteor strikes and we run out of natural resources like oil and various metals all at the same time then that could cause a problem because things could grind to a halt.
The question was if our ability to sustain our infrastructure was destroyed either by environmental disaster or a lack of the natural resources we are dependent on to keep civilization going, what are the most important medical advances we should be focusing on with those highly limited resources and wealth? This is assuming trade has broken down and we do not have the oil to run most of our machines or some of the natural resources to build products.
In the real world, even if those things did happen we would never be reduced to the levels of a 1500AD society merely because we have the scientific and technological resourcefulness that people didn’t have back then. People in rural China today live better than people in rural France 500 years ago even with their incomes of $2/day.
The question was basically if our infrastructure collapsed and we had very few resources to draw on (aka we didn’t have a system of global trade or 2.4 trillion to devote to healthcare) what are the most important advances to rebuild.
At the top of my list would be retaining a scientific method–double-blind studies, for example–to discovery.
Second on the list, and perhaps closer to the sort of thing you are asking for is vaccination.
Healthcare lends itself to shamans, quacks and witches. Because we value life and health so highly, it’s easy to get suckered in. We’ll do and pay practically anything for a shot at living longer or curing our disease.
With healthful lifestyles and decent public hygiene, we can be pretty healthy with only basic care. Adding the last 10 or 20 years and truly improving the 10 or 20% who are unfortunate to get really screwed over by bad accidents and various non-self-resolving disease processes requires modern medicine. If we reset the civilization clock, we could make progress again if we retain a scientific approach. Without it, we’ll deteriorate pretty rapidly.
It’s surprisingly hard to show that fancy medicine makes a difference. Over the years medicine has moved from fairly benign and ineffective to fairly dangerous and effective. We are now finally moving to an era where it’s both safe and effective, but we are only just starting to get there.
(When we do get there, that’s what’s going to break us financially, by the way, because we’ll be able to fix aortic valves in 90 year-olds and prove it prolongs their lives…)
Holy Handmaid’s Tale. What a search on infant mortality in the 1500s can find on the net.
In the event of disaster, first lets take away women’s rights.
And to think I came to this board through a question on Elizabeth I of England which lead to King Philip which led to the many deaths of his children and to his wife who was daughter of Catherine D’Medici the defacto ruler of France in the 1500s.
Of course the people who responded to this thread with sanitation, innoculations, diarrhea prevention, basic medical principles (e.g. germ theory, modern midwifery,) are correct.
As for farming, ask the Amish if you want farming advice. Or, better yet a surviving farmer.
Don’t you know that educationing and freeing women reduces infant and child mortality? Hello Afghanistan.
Pediatrics, until the late industrial revolution if a child made it to 5 years old it was lucky.
I’d go for hygiene,antiseptics,antibiotics and anaesthetics,plus knowing that there are different blood types…