Broomstick:
Has happened to my wife three times. (and before you ask, the last two of those times, she was on birth control as well)
Well, gosh, that would be an awful lot of cites but I’ve been reading about it for decades.
Time of menarche varies due to genetics, diet, activity level, stress… it is entirely possible that at the time period you mention Jewish girls were menstruating that early on a regular basis but that’s one population at one time in history.
The better the nutrition the early the girl starts menstruating.
It would be very difficult to do, but I suppose in some cases it’s possible.
If this is inspired by the Duggars, keep in mind that she’s had two twin pregnancies.
You’re really asking 2 different questions here… the first quoted parts of the OP seem to ask if the average human female could biologically produce 19+ children under either an extremely unusual (or even unrealistic) set of circumstances such as being penned up into a birthing cage and bred like we do with pigs or other factory farming practices.
But the second quoted part then sets up the scenario assuming very normal and realistic circumstances. So the answer to the bolded part of that 2nd version of the question is clearly “NO”, given normal circumstances as described the average woman will clearly not have that many children.
A couple posts have responded to the possibility of the other question being asked, but it doesn’t look like there has been enough input to answer that… and I’m not sure if humanity has ever truly tried to industrialize the human baby making process to the extent we have done with farm animals so the question may be unanswerable.
Wow … 28 cousins just on your mom’s side … I only have ten total …
The referenced ‘former cult member’ is maybe me: growing up in quiverfull families. The most I knew of had 9, all single births, with two sets that had birthdays in the same year. So, (pulling rough dates out of my ass here) two kids shared 1984 as their birth year, and a younger duo shared 1992. Another family had 7, but there was a set of adopted twins and a natural set of triplets. The twins were originally from someone else in their extended family - so they seem a fertile bunch anyway.
My dad was in the youngest batch of a total of 13, same mom, three different dads (widowed each time. The aunts said that Gramma was hard on her men. :eek:) Two died in infancy and I think two more in early childhood, but they all were born live, and my dad was the same age as several of his nephews from the earliest-born sisters.
My other grandmother was one of 6 herself, and that was a pretty common number on that side of the family back then.
I hope I’m not double-posting; my phone just ate my post.
My ex-husband’s grandmother had 20 children, all single births. 18 made it to adulthood. One died a couple days after birth, another at 18 months. So my mother-in-law had 17 adult siblings. My ex-husband has 64 first cousins. His grandmother died in her early 50’s of a brain aneurysm.
They lived in a rural area of the state and aren’t on the Wikipedia list.
I had two cousins on my father’s side… and at least 45 on my mother’s. She was one of seven, six of whom had children, and one who had two families of at least five. (Serially, one very young and the second a bit on the older side.)
While 19 isn’t that common, move to Amish country and in all liklihood, some of your neighbors will have 14+ kids.
While not Amish, my mother came from a family of 14 kids, no twins. Twelve survived to adulthood (that gives me 37 first cousins on that side plus five sibs).
The thing you’re not taking into account is that the average woman doesn’t conceive in the first month of unprotected sex - not even in her most fertile years, and the length of average time to conception goes up with age. All being normal, you have around a 25% chance of conception each month.
So, although it’s technically possible for a woman to have a baby a year, it would be very far from the average. If ovulation returns on average 2 1/2 months after birth (as mentioned upthread), she would have to get pregnant on the first ovulation every single time. And that’s not average.
From what I remember reading when we were thinking about having kids, the rough average time to get pregnant is three months in your twenties, six months in your early thirties, nine months to a year in your late thirties, and anyone’s guess in your forties. So nearer to the average would be if she got pregnant after 3 months of ovulation each time during her twenties (so one baby every 15 months, for a total of eight babies), after 6 months of ovulation every time in her early thirties (so one baby every 18 months, let’s say three babies), maybe ten months of ovulation every time in her late thirties (so a baby every 22 months, let’s say three there as well), and maybe one baby thrown in there in her forties. That’s a total of fifteen.
Also, on average about one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage, so you have to factor those in and adjust the maths around when they happened and how long fertility takes to return afterwards. Which I have no clue about.
All in all, it looks to me like your average woman in optimal conditions is gonna end up with maybe a dozen kids.
Start with those 15, and add in 2-3 more for the ones she has in her teens, and you’re getting awfully close to 19.
Miscarriages will change the math only a bit, because most miscarriages happen in the first few weeks or months, and for a very early miscarriage, the woman may ovulate again with two to three weeks. (A later-pregnancy loss usually extends that time to several months.) In fact, some research suggests that women who conceive within six months of a miscarriage have better outcomes than those who wait a few months longer. (cite)
According to data from the World Bank, in 1960 there were still a number of countries where average births per woman wan in the range of 6 to 8. In Afghanistan, e.g., it was 7.5, in Kenya 7.9. These are derived from statistics on live births, so already account for miscarriages and other losses, and certainly reflect less than optimal conditions. These women were breast-feeding, and in most of these countries would have been expected to do their full share of “women’s work”–in Kenya, for example, men tend the livestock and women do the planting, weeding, and harvesting of food crops, with very little overlap in gender roles.
While female children would be expected to help their mothers with younger siblings, male children usually weren’t, and the females would be leaving to start their own families by their early to mid-teens anyway(there are still parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where a majority of females are married by 16; in some areas of rural Yemen, the average age is 12 to 13).
If women typically had seven or eight kids under these conditions, having twice as many under optimal conditions isn’t hard to imagine.
No you won’t. This is getting into the extraordinarily creepy range. 19 children for a given mother is so far out on the normal curve that it is at least as unlikely as a lottery win.
Don’t think of it in terms of simple addition. It is a bell curve where 12 children is extremely high and realistic under some scenarios but 19 is WAAYYY out there. It is like the difference between an IQ of 120 versus 160. The numbers don’t sound that far apart until you run the stats and find that the claim just went from being the highest number of kids in your family to the highest ever recorded in your state.
It is an extraordinary claim and it gets worse when people suggest that it could be done if an average woman was forced to have both kids and sex constantly for decades at a time possibly with the help of fertility treatments. That is more than a little bizarre and probably wouldn’t work either. Maternity and childbirth are very hard on the female body. You are proposing some type of dystonian zoo where the women are pushed to their birthing limits. Fertility treatments usually take a while to work if they do at all and multiple births can compromise the ability to get pregnant easily again.
It is very sad but women have endured those conditions before through slavery, kidnapping or extreme religious practices and it doesn’t produce anywhere near 19 children on average. The human reproductive process simply isn’t designed to do that. You can shoot for 9 or 10 if everyone is healthy and you are really ambitious but anything over than that requires luck. 19 is way out of bounds for the average woman.
Having 5+ babies is called grand multiparity. Having 10+ children is called great grand multiparity. It’s been a while since I did obstetrics, but fewer than 1 on 200 mothers have 5+ kids and 19 would be rare. In addition to perpetual pregnancy, it is medically rare since the risk of many problems increases with many births, including malformations, malpresentation, hemorrhage, anemia, perinatal mortality, etc. Pregnancy uses a lot of iron, babies are hard on the uterus and pelvic muscles and multiple deliveries can cause incontinence and prolapse, it can take months for the mother to regain the large amounts of iron needed by the placenta… And few families want so many kids.
I know that my ancestor who left Switzerland to travel to the New World was the 15th of 15 children. This is on our family tree. It looks like about half those 15 died in infancy, but still, he must have figured there wasn’t going to be much left for him as an inheritance. And I’m awfully grateful to his parents for having that many children.
Hi all! Someone can help me here please?? :smack:http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19768711#post19768711
Thank you!! 
Reported. Don’t click on his link. It is fake.
My mother was intentionally pregnant, and had a 5-month miscarriage after a bout of the flu. She was pregnant again within about four months, and my brother was a normal pregnancy, a 10lb+ baby (born two weeks before his due date, prompting jokes about the 10 pound “preemie”), who had enjoyed exceptional health.
Regarding the “mother’s body needing time to recover iron,” etc. I remember a conversation with a biology student (I was an English student) about Tiny Tim’s illness. He said that Dickens was on the mark making Tim the youngest. In large urban families in poverty in the Victorian era, it was probably common to see a decline in general health from the oldest to the youngest, until no more babies survived, because the urban diet didn’t allow for a mother to ever fully recover from the demands pregnancy put on her body.
That was almost 200 years ago, and isn’t true anymore, but does make the point that “average” means just the “average” middle class American woman with access to nutrition and healthcare.
There a sort of paradox that countries (and US subcultures) where childbirth begins early don’t always have the best diets and medical care, while the people with the best access to nutrition and healthcare are the ones who tend to have first babies around 26-30, and otherwise use family planning.
The normal curve, however, assumes fairly normal conditions–breastfeeding, mother’s attention given to raising the children, resource constraints, available nutrition, etc. When those constraints don’t exist, why would you assume the distribution curve would look anything like the distribution curve under those constraints?
While pregnancy/childbirth are indeed very hard on the female body, in most mammals the females do give birth on a quite regular schedule. For example, in horses the average duration of pregnancy is 11 months, and breeders typically assume that 80-85% of the broodmare herd will have a foal in any given year. That means it is not unusual for a mare to have ten foals in twelve years. Among feral horses not under regular veterinary care, the rate isn’t much different; around 75% of the wild mares on Assateague Island, e.g., will have a foal every year.
I don’t think this is a good argument. An IQ of 100 is defined as the median score for a given population, and is periodically re-normed; an IQ of 100 on the Wechsler scale of 1949 doesn’t even mean the same thing as a score of 100 on the Wechsler scale of 2014. (That also means that the percentage of the population alive today who could score 160 on the 1949 version of the test is much larger than the percentage who could do so in 1949, so a score of 120 under one set of conditions may indeed be comparable to a score of 160 under a different set of conditions.)
In what society have women enjoyed good access to adequate nutrition, quality medical care, and no need to concern themselves with taking care of children already born while being encouraged to produce as many as possible? Slaves don’t have that access; while women in, e.g., fundamentalist Mormon or Quiverfull families are supposed to have lots of kids, they’re also supposed to be very invested in those kids (lots of Quiverfull moms home-school, e.g.).
Isabella of Angouleme was the wife of King John (Brother of Richard the Lionhearted, king of Robin Hood notoriety…). There’s some dispute when she got married; the general consensus was about 12 or 13; one contemporary said that John would neglect kingly business to give her the business, sometimes until noon. yet they were married in 1200AD, yet she did not give birth until 1207AD, so figure about 6 years between when regular sex started and her first pregnancy “caught”. After that she cranked them out pretty regular, 5 children in the next 8 years with John; after he died in 1216, she remarried in 1220 and had 9 more kids.
So depending on which age you believe - married at 9, 10, 12, 13? - she had regular sex for 6 years before she started having children, and then had no problem getting pregnant on a regular basis after that. That sort of suggests she did not begin menarche until well into her teens… And this was a noblewoman who was likely well nourished, although I guess the question is how good nourishment would be for even a rich woman in a seasonal environment, and whether women got the level of nourishment men would? I guess the other question is whether the other attributes of puberty would be apparent even if menstruation had not started (or was King John a pervert?)
OTOH, by contrast Samuel Pepys and his wife were married when she was 14; some question whether the marriage was properly consummated, they both had medical problems and never did have any children IIRC. So it balances out.
Families of about 10 or so were fairly common in Quebec society until a generation or two ago; Celine Dione, for example, was from a family of 8. I worked with a lady who had 12 siblings, albeit some were half-siblings with a step-mother. (same father)
I did a family tree for my father’s family from southern England, where they were farmers. It appears that the typical family was about 3 children up until the late 1700’s, when 5 to 8 children became common - but apparently so did infant mortality. One family lists 3 successive children named Peter, a year apart, none of whom survived the year. Maybe the earlier families had higher mortality but skipped the formal baptism (where births were recorded) when the child died. It was not unusual for the families in the 1700’s to wait 3 to 6 months to have the baptism, where birth dates are also recorded.
Recall even Galbraith’s “Cheaper by the Dozen”, in the early part of the 20th century, 12 children was still considered quite remarkable; and even then, one child died early.
So per the OP - possibility of pregnancy back then happened later than nowadays - but women typically married and started families earlier than nowadays with extended childhood and education. Regular pregnancy did happen, and larger families were common, but extremely large families of 13 or more were still rare; and infant mortality and death in childbirth were much more common.
Orthodox women in the US and Israel marry around age 20, breastfeed, are part of tight communities where there is lots of help available, enjoy good nutrition and healthcare, and still have about 4.1 children per adult-- 8.2 per couple, in other words. That is a US statistic, and includes Haredi, Modern Orthodox, Chabad, and Chassidim.
Now, birth control is not forbidden to Orthodox Jews, and in fact, is REQUIRED if a doctor deems a further pregnancy to be a threat to the mother’s life. A few couples use it if there is some reason that it is necessary to extend the distance between two children, or if a mother has post-partum depression, and cannot nurse, but also cannot risk becoming pregnant again due to taking an
antidepressant, for example.
But even if removal of occasional birth control use increased the birth rate, it would probably not increase it by more than 100%.
Now, Jews don’t have sex non-stop, but the times forbidden to them are during a woman’s period, and immediately post-partum (and the occasional corpse impurity, but people who prepare bodies are usually post-menopausal women for this reason). Couples are encouraged to have lots of sex during permitted times, which happen to be a woman’s most fertile times. I doubt more sex would significantly increase the number of children.
Now, there will always be couples with fertility problems bringing down the average-- I know one Orthodox couple who has one child they had through expensive fertility treatments, and another child adopted from Russia, and that is it. Still, I doubt eliminating infertile couples would up the average more than about 3 children per couple-- certainly not by 11 children.
Michelle “Constant Breeder” Duggar is an outlier, however you slice it.
Some women I know report feeling especially good while pregnant. Some feel really good. Maybe the Michelle Duggars feel sort of “high,” so they are like people who regularly run 20 miles because it gives them some kind of high.
Personally, I was miserable when pregnant, and at any rate, I needed a c-section, and probably would have been constrained by the “No more than four” rule of c-sections.