[Gagarin1917]

That’s looking at history through a modern lens.

The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex.

They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.

[kixiQu]

It's more complicated than that.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...

[Balgair]

TLDR: Peasants could expect between 8-12 pregnancies, with 2 (!) surviving to adulthood.

Christ, that is a lot of dead children for every woman. Your heart just breaks over and over.

[pawelduda]

This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms