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

[naath]

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

The first world war killed roughly 2% of the British population and had a significant effect on the ability of women to find husbands in the years following.

If 10% of your population are pregnant at the time of the event and 1-in-5 of them die that's 2% of your population dead (2400 is a bit less than 10%). Worth considering that if all the men have gone orf to fight a war then they aren't at home getting their wives pregnant.

I would expect that most of the war dead would be male; so the problem of a gender imbalance might be reduced.

Having this event happen may make women more worried about pregnancy than before (although pregnancy is already pretty worrying if you don't have good health care) - is it possible it will happen again? Although reliable contraception is unlikely to exist *unreliable* contraception probably does, and is widely known about, possibly disapproved of but likely used; abstinence of course does work... will a year of no babies lead women to try harder to have babies, or to try harder to avoid babies?