Gotta wonder if the women thought that was progress, or not.
Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no children at all.
You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in Canada.
A very different situation than pondering one's bloodline.
2003 is antiquity?
It's not like women don't tend to love children...