ANy history people here

[duaqnugW]

Dumb question! cause I am just curious


Lets say 17th,18th, 19th century how did people protect from pregnancy and its not abstinance cause they had children but not crazy amount either.

 

[Rarr]

I know in ancient Rome they used goat bladders (sort of like a condom) as one method.

 

[CStroman]

Maybe they had a lot of children, but most ended up dying at an early age.

 

[StageLeft]

Rhythm method (not doing it certain times of month), or Withdraw method where you pull out at last second and give a free face painting.

 

[FrogDog]

<< Rhythm method (not doing it certain times of month), or Withdraw method where you pull out at last second and give a free face painting. >>

Face painting? I don't under....oh.

 

[Hammer]

Infant morality was very high back.

 

[StageLeft]

<< Infant morality was very high back [then]. >>

heh

 

[cipher00]

Not to mention, say, the Black Death (1/3 or Europeans snuffed) and other diseases. (That was a bit earlier, of course, but still...). Even if you made it out of infancy, you were still likely to die at what today we would consider a very young age.

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

from here:

BIRTH CONTROL
For as long as people have been engaging in sex they?ve been inventing unique means of preventing it?s frequent result: pregnancy. The most commonly used form of birth control over thousands of years has been good old fashioned ?coitus interruptus? or pulling out before the explosion, but there have been many other most interesting approaches.
The precursors of modern birth control emerged in Egypt about 300 B.C. There they used mechanical and chemical methods that foreshadow modern diaphragms, cervical caps and spermicides. Their versions included lint pads soaked in honey and acacia tips, and crocodile dung compacted with auyt-gum, both to be inserted into the vagina as a barrier to semen.

Some Romans of the 4th century decided that the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancy was to diminish a wife?s desire for sexual intercourse. Specific methods included: mouse dung liniment; swallowing pigeon droppings mixed with oil and wine; or rubbing her loins with the blood of ticks off a wild black bull.

Condoms began to come into their own during the eighteenth century. They were usually made of sheep gut, or sometimes fish skin and were originally introduced not for prevention of pregnancy but as a protection against syphilis.

 

[Novgrod]

I actually have the unfortunate circumstance of knowing quite a bit about this

The ancient Romans used coitus interruptus, olive oil on the you-know-what, and then some weird, weird stuff:

there were magic talismans to ward off pregnancy, there were various rites that would do likewise, and I think there was one that involved jumping up and down.

If there was a pregnancy, the most common form of abortion was to take a drug that would be deadly enough to kill the kid without (ideally) killing the mother.

If a child was born, the father had the power within the first two weeks to kill it, no questions asked. He would frequently use this against his female children.

Even if a kid survived all this, he had a 33% chance of death before hitting age one because of disease, famine, and the like.

Oh, I should mention that medical practice was all screwed up: pregnant women were supposed to be active until they gave birth, and then to be active immediately thereafter. Babies were to be given goat's milk and honey rather than mothers' milk for the first few days because the mothers' milk was chunky (truth: full of proteins and antibodies) and therefore "bad"

The real reason women didn't become pregnant was by lactating for a year or more after childbirth. When you're lactating, you're not fertile (usually). The average, btw, was I think six children per fertile woman.


Later, many of the more barbarous practices fell off, and the most common forms of contraception was coitus interruptus.