How did women avoid pregnancy before the pill?

[ericcartman]

How come most families weren't the size of football teams back then? I mean bar any fertility issues or couples stopping having sex what else was there? I know condoms and abortions have been around for ages in one form or another but I doubt either was that common till the 20th century, especially when talking about married couples.

I remember Gran telling me that when oranges were freely available in this country they were halved and some of the flesh scraped out and used as a dutch cap to amazing effect. I often think of this when cutting an orange in two.

People said that anal sex was used to avoid pregnancy in the past but homosexuality was illegal and unaccepted so I'm not sure if anal sex wouldn't be taboo too. Though not all societies.

Oh it was definitely taboo - sodomy was a mortal sin i think. But i believe it was used. Agree that withdrawal would have been a lot more common though.

Withdrawal''s a sin too though, isn't it?

If you go far enough back, anal sex isn't automatically associated with same-sex activity, though, so I think it would have been seen as less of a terrible sin. Certainly in medieval Catholicism, sex between two men is really awful, whereas sex in the 'wrong' positions (woman on top, anal, etc.) is bad but not so awful.

A while back, I read an article by a devout Christian gay bloke. He reconciled his faith with the bible's pronouncements on homosexuality by framing it within the context of the time and place it was written. He said much Old Testament guidance was about passing on knowledge about survival in the environment of the Middle East thousands of years ago. So, avoid these foods (because the heat will make them bad and food poisoning could kill you), in uncertain times when medical and agricultural knowledge wasn't great, so famine, disease and maternal & infant mortality high, energy expended on sex would need to be productive to ensure the species survived, so gay sex and sex that could not lead to pregnancy were verboten.

Presumably when the Protestant Church was formed, they reviewed some rules but Catholics and Orthodox churches kept it old skool.

As a confirmed atheist, I have no idea how sound this theory is, but thought it interesting.

Foldy, I don’t think the Protestant Church was quite that advanced when it formed, but what that priest said makes a lot of sense and is certainly the sort of position the CofE takes these days. I was at a funeral taken by a gay priest recently, it was beautiful and very high church.

The Protestant Church doesn't exist - there are several different ones formed at different times across several centuries. So they differ.

High Church Anglicans tend to be socially liberal, despite dating to the sixteenth century; Westboro Baptist, though more recent, is of the good old 'burn the gays' school of thought.

Boringly, the rules Protestant churches have tended to revise have been to do with things like the Eucharist or the sacraments.

That sounds like bolleaux to me FoldyRoll, I don't think bum sex has ever been a proper threat to human reproduction.

Zzzzz certainty an interesting google.
I'd picked up the orthodox Greek werent allowed but i (ignorance maybe) thought they weren't far from RC anyway.
Missed Orthodox jews - is there a link between Orthodox Jews and Greek Orthodox - ie did GO form from OJ???

Foddyroll - some of what you say makes sense like avoiding pork it goes off very quickly in heat. However gay priest - doesn't sound right.

Protestant churches - the key word is Protest - the people of them protested against the rule from Rome.

Once people were free of Rome they then had various splinter groups who believe / focused on various aspects of the religion.
Some kneel in prayer, some just bow. Some believe in Infant Baptism (Christening) some believe that the person should wait until they decide etc. Some have a leader who's voted into place for a short time (CoS) others have a leader who's born into it (CoE).
Much less hierarchy in Church of Scotland than the Church of England.

Thats what i meant are Greek Orthodox a sort of break away group from Orthodox Jews?
I knew for years Jesus was born a Jew and their were clear links between the 2 religions. But what i didn't know until a few years ago he is also mentioned in the Koran.

What does Orthodox actually mean - away to do more googling.

What history books have you been reading? Of course they all had many many pregnancies, but most died in vitro or at birth. Lots of miscarriages and abortions too. It was common to have 20 or 30 pregnancies but only 12 live births.

www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/anderson-review/fertility

"[The researchers] chart the dates that 37 groups made the fertility transition, defined as a 10 percent decline in marital fertility."

"France was the clear pioneer, making the fertility transition at the latest in 1827 (other data suggests the transition happened at least two decades earlier). Germany made the transition in 1888, England in 1892 and Italy crossed the line in 1913. The island of Sardinia, in 1934, was the last."

"What the data don’t show is why France led the way. Wacziarg speculates that cultural ideas born in the Age of Enlightenment and developed during the French Revolution played a key role. For example, the revolution occurred with a backdrop of rising anticlericalism, which undermined the Catholic Church’s opposition to fertility controls. Also a factor, he suggests, was the way libertine novels of the 18th century spread the notion that sex could be for pleasure, not just reproduction. Whatever the root cause, he says, having fewer children became socially acceptable."

"While other factors like a drop in child mortality and a later marriage age for women also contributed, the timing of the change, in the first two decades after the French Revolution, “suggests that the social and cultural change around this momentous event may have played a role in changing fertility norms within the village,” the authors write."

In-vitro means in glass!

If you think about it all Christians are decended from Jews. Some Jews choose to follow Jesus (became Christian) and some didn't.

Interesting that France which is a RC country was first to start using contraception.

The single creator god bit blew my mind about 10 years ago. For some reason it had been put across to me that Jews & Christians had same God but Muslims had a different God.

But then there are people who see bigger divisions within the Christian church than they actually are iykwim.

The Orthodox Church is the second-largest Christian denomination (the Roman Catholic Church is the largest). These two groups disagreed with each other in 1054, over the theology of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. So, nothing to do with Judaism as it's much, much later and pretty heavily invested in the God-the-Son bit that split Christianity off from Judaism.

Orthodox just means they think they're following the 'correct' rules. It means 'correct teachings' in Greek. Catholic comes from the Greek for 'whole' or 'all', meaning that the Catholic Church is the church of all the world. That's incidentally why Anglicans, despite having split from the Catholic Church, refer to belonging to 'one holy catholic Church' in their Creed.

LRD thank-you very much for that very informative post.

I see no one has mentioned oral sex yet.

Could this not have been a preferred form of non- procreative sex?

Do people actually have oral sex regularly? I hate it