Population decline

[salamandraugr]

Setting: Secondary world technologically equivalent to the early 19th century.
Search terms: no new births, declining birth rate, sub-replacement fertility, historical pregnancy per capita, historical birth rate

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Some of it's going to depend on other factors. You could roughly estimate maybe 15-20% of a pre-modern population are women of childbearing age (many children, few old people) but an immigrant population is probably going to have a larger number of people who were older children and young adults at time of immigration and who are able to travel, so skew that a bit higher to say 25%. Of all women, there's a steady number of about 12.5% (up to 30% in certain times and places) who never have children, so let's knock that back to 15-20

[naath]

I think the reduced number of women is likely to have more effect than one year with no babies

[salamandraugr]

I like those numbers. 2400 women losing their babies and over 400 of them dying in a single night would be enough to scare the rest of the city, even those of other ethnic groups. Word of mouth and yellow journalism would make things seem significantly worse.

[houseboatonstyx]

Dunno how deep you want to go for background, but if you're interested in public reaction in Britain to this event, Malthus was writing about related issues in early 19th Century.

These are links at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

An Essay on the Principle of Population

1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.. Anonymously published.

1803: Second and much enlarged edition: An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness; with an enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions. Authorship acknowledged.
[....]
8 Other works
8.1 1800: The present high price of provisions
8.2 1814: Observations on the effects of the Corn Laws
8.3 1820: Principles of political economy
For names people might be

[salamandraugr]

Thanks. I'll take a look at the text.

[xolo]

What's a realistic number of pregnant women among these 32,000 people?

If the population is neither growing nor shrinking because of birth and death (excluding immigration), then each female has enough children over the course of her childbearing years to keep the population stable, no more and no fewer. In a modern western society, that number (the replacement fertility rate) is around 2.1 children per woman. If we estimate a woman's childbearing years as 20-35, then she has 16 years to produce those 2.1 children. Gestation takes nine months, so that sixteen years works neatly out to about 21 gestational periods. Ten percent of the women should be pregnant at any one time. That's 1600 pregnant women from the population of 32000.

Replacement rates will be higher in less-developed countries, of course, as more people die before reproducing.