In light of some women who have given birth to 19 children in contemporary history, I wanted to ask the medical question as to whether this reflects what the **average **woman’s reproductive system would be capable of doing.
Ignoring for now such issues as whether the family can afford to raise the children, whether this is wise or not, etc. - suppose that an average woman with average fertility, and an average man with average virility, sperm, etc. were to be married at age 20 and have sex regularly - let’s say, once a week - and never used contraception - would having an extremely large family - 19 children or even more - be the logical medical outcome, over the course of decades?
I would say obviously not given that literally billions of couples have had frequent sex without contraception over many thousands of years and 19 births is at the very high end of the distribution for anyone. It is hard to pull it off mathematically or biologically. To have 19 live-born children, a woman would need to stay pregnant almost constantly from the teenage years until fertility drops off precipitously in her mid to late 30’s. That isn’t easy to do even with daily sex without contraception. There will probably be a few miscarriages than need to be offset by twins or triplets for it to work at all.
It is difficult and takes some luck to break even the very low double digits even without contraception. Most women can’t get pregnant on demand especially in their 30’s. It can take many months to years to conceive even if it is intentional. Having that many children in succession tends to wreck their body in lots of ways and stands a very good chance of being fatal to the mothers or some of the children without very good medical care.
Since women don’t die in childbirth as much as they used to, there’s no biological reason why they couldn’t.
One limitation is that breastfeeding may suppress ovulation, so mothers who breastfeed longer tend to space out their pregnancies a little more. But if the woman didn’t breastfeed, returned to having regular sex as soon as possible after childbirth, and stayed in general good health, there doesn’t seem to be any limitation to getting pregnant once a year, or even more often.
I am not saying it is impossible because people have done it real life. However, the question is if the average woman could do it. My answer is still no because 19 births is so far out on the distribution curve. The real average is probably closer to what you see in agricultural societies that need(ed) as many helping hands as they can get. That number is in the high single digit range.
My grandfather has the highest number of siblings that I am personally familiar with. He is one of 12 and that is only because his father was a fire-and-brimstone preacher that believed his job was to populate the Earth with other Christians of his type. They were on a mission from God and 12 was the best they could offer. Even then, some of the kids died extremely young.
If we’re assuming humans being kept well-fed and healthy, in some kind of alien zoo, and encouraged to have sex every day, and babies are immediately taken away to another part of the zoo… then I could see 19 being achievable by the average woman, yes. But that’s an awful lot of assumptions. In real life, some of the women would be underfed, some suffering from various diseases, some recovering from injuries, some dying in childbirth, and they would fight tooth and nail against having their babies taken away. Plus, a significant fraction would lose their sex drive if they figured out that they were being treated as baby factories.
I do not have a citation, but I was under the impression in hunter gatherer societies children were born about 3-5 years apart. That means if a woman started having kids at 15, she would have about 4-8 total in her life.
But that is in situations without medical care, and with limited resources. Plus I’m not sure how valid that claim is anyway.
Doesn’t a woman hit menarche in her early teens and reach infertility in her late 40s? The older you get, the harder it is to get pregnant but there are ways around it too. That gives about 35 years of fertility.
Well, right - my hypothetical question assumes that external factors such as money, environment, health care, child caretakers, etc. are not a problem at all, and that it’s just a matter of having sex very regularly beginning from age 20 onwards until menopause. In other words, kind of like the baby-making zoo as you describe.
Here is a list of the women that gave birth to the most children. Notice that it is only one page and the list stops at 20 which is just short of 19.
The list of lottery winners would fill a very large book and a list of current billionaires is many times longer. In other words, having 19 or more children is even more rare than other ultra-rare events. I think it is safe to say that 19 is in no way ‘normal’ no matter how you look at it.
The term ‘average’ doesn’t really fit with this question either. Neither the mean, median or mode works because a significant percentage of women have fertility issues or cannot conceive at all. You can’t have women having 30 kids to offset those that can only have a few or none because that isn’t possible. What does ‘average’ mean then? You would have to define it so that it is really asking whether those women that are biologically capable of having 19 children can pull it off? That is both circular and speculative. There are undoubtedly a few that can but the vast majority can’t.
Right, good point - I suppose ‘average’ meant woman with a reproductive system of average health and capability. Another way to ask would be, were the women who did have 19 or more kids unusually fertile, or were they just reflecting what the female reproductive system is technically capable of if put to - well, “maximum use”?
Most women who are capable of having children are not capable of having 19 precisely BECAUSE of money, environment, health care, child caretakers, etc. For example, in those agricultural societies Shagnasty mentioned that needed as many hands as possible, Mama isn’t out there just producing more hands; she’s got to take care of the ones already born. (The contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, e.g., have already been mentioned.)
There are precious few societies where women had no role in child-rearing to take them away from producing more. Perhaps the closest version would be very wealthy women in medieval and early modern societies who could rely upon wet nurses and servants, freeing her up to have more kids, but even there health care and marital separations would have acted as brakes. To give a few examples, though, from English royal history:
Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, 8 kids between 1153 and 1166 (she already had two from her first marriage)
John and Isabella of Angouleme, 5 kids between 1207 and 1215 (she had nine more with her second husband)
Henry III and Eleanor of Provence had 5 children between 1239 and 1253.
Edward I and Eleanor of Castile had 16 children, 1255-1284 (Edward had several more with his second wife)
Edward II and Isabella of France had 4 between 1312 and 1321
Edward III and Phillippa of Hainault had 13, 1330-1355
My mother’s mother had 15 children (4 were stillborn and I don’t know if she had any additional miscarriages). I believe she married at age 16 (possibly 14 :eek:) and Granddad liked flying his kite.
Keep in mind, too, that in some H-G societies when there were multiple births only one of the babies was allowed to live. The H-G lifestyle is not very compatible with multiple infants at the same time.
That is only true in the modern world. Go back 100 years, or 120 and women generally didn’t start menstruating until their middle or even late teens. In the past people weren’t as well nourished and generally didn’t reach sexual maturity as quickly as they do today. I don’t know if menopause tended to come sooner or later, it’s possible we simply don’t know. There may have been times in history when most women didn’t live long enough to experience menopause.
As for when natural fertility peters out… I believe the record for natural conception without modern medical technologies is around 56… but that’s as much an outlier as the young girl who gave birth at the age of 6.
I’m guessing that in the past, meaning pre-modern medical care and with less certain food supply, most women only had about 20 years of fertility, with the occasional surprise baby in the 40’s. To have more than the H-G 4-8 kids in a lifetime you need agricultural food production. 10 kids in a family wasn’t that unusual post agriculture (my mother had 9 siblings, for example, what was considered unusual was that they all lived to adulthood) but getting beyond that was remarkable. I’ve heard of families with 15 kids all from one mother but those families were considered quite unusual, and probably had at least one pair of twins.
I think 19 is probably a little above average. But I’m thinking that all my forebears of the late 19th century were in families that had 10-12 children and, in the case of both my grandparents, 12 children. Now of all these great-aunts and -uncles, most of them did not have nearly as many children (although my grandmother* had 10) and some of them never married or never had any. So the average was much less.
I find the idea quite exhausting, myself. But I think most healthy women could probably do it if they wanted to.
*Who got married in 1904, when she was 16, and had her first baby in 1906 and her last one in 1929. One of my aunts and one of my uncles were less than a year apart in age, and always in the same grade.
From** Shagnasty’s **list, the most fertile two women who did NOT have any twins had 27 children each. Only one in thirty births are a twin birth, so the women above that count, who mostly got there by having multiple twins, triplets and even quads or quins, are clearly more-than-ordinarily fertile. An ordinarily fertile woman going for 19 kids would generally expect to do so with 0 or 1 twin births. So - 18 or 19 pregnancies, starting from age 20, one a year gets you to age 39, well into the age where fertility is starting to decline … I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think the ‘one a year’ schedule is all that realistic even for women at peak fertility, considering that some estimates are that only 30% of fertilised eggs implant, and another 10 or 20 percent of pregnancies end in a miscarriage.
My grandmother just missed the mark, and had 18 children–14 are still alive today. My mom once told me that a doctor had warned Grandma at one point that it was dangerous for her to have any more, but she and Grandpa went ahead and had 2 or 3 after that.
I suspect 14 is more the average. That was a big but not at all unheard of number pre modern medicine, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s what you got when you got lucky, medically.