Umm... abstinence causes people to have sex with animals?
Count me as more than a little skeptical.
This essay is a "just so" story, full of completely unsubstantiated assertions.
As a foreigner from a smaller nation, my experience is that the way to have "substantiated" assertions about your history is to have British or French scientists misunderstand it and write a paper in the Royal Society Journal or some similar nonsense.
The way to have "unsubstantiated" assertions is to ask grandma, who was there.
I'm more concerned about the source (the Internet), but if this were in a local paper, I'd trust assertions like the ones here much more than imperial scientists.
Japan during much of the Tokugawa period (after 1700) is an example of that kind of self-stabilizing population. They used:
* Abortion
* On-birth infanticide (don't be quick to judge)
* Delayed marriage (which also means more years of celibacy before marriage I guess?)
https://international.uiowa.edu/sites/international.uiowa.ed...
and AFAICT this was not government-enforced or even strongly-government-encouraged.
Why the hell not? That’s not a particularly enlightened solution.
* If you keep your baby, you are nearly-guaranteeing hunger of your family or your village in 10 years or so. And people in your community would hold a grudge against you and your child for it, from day one.
* The cultural norm regarding when life is sacred was different. Many people in the US believe in-womb abortion is not particularly enlightened either.
This is really not the case, in the western world fertility dropped steadily through the 19th century. People had some control over the reproductive process even without the pill/latex condoms. By the year 1900, TFR was already under 3 in France.
I will always remember a slightly tipsy conversation I had with a farmer in the back of a liquor store I worked in the 90's.
I thought I heard it all until that day.
Also had other stories that were less lascivious. Some were about what families resort to in a society without mental health care. Relatives chained in the courtyard raving.
It sounds like they were still having sex, just not having enough babies to replace themselves, which could have been dealt with on its own in a very dry demographic way.
Bringing abortion, beastiality and sexual abstinence into it seems to muddy the waters for no clear benefit to the point that they were trying to make, which I think is, that if you have less than replacement rate babies, then your population will fall. But maybe that seemed a little too tautological without the extra details to distract the reader.
Also, the writers own story seems to suggest that these people (e.g. his great-grandmother) did have descendents (e.g. the author) it's just that they moved to the city, which I think was a big trend everywhere.
Apart from anything else, that goes back to at least biblical times (otherwise why would there be a rule about it in the Bible?)
I suspect that, given the author is talking about overcrowding and lack of privacy, they had enough people living under one roof for at least one of them to just… prefer that. (e.g. p=0.02, 50 people, or whatever).