On the surface, I understand your thinking, and I figured someone would ask, but there was just no way to fit all of this into the same essay. So I'm glad you did ask! :)
There are, frankly, a ton of fundamental differences between society then and society today that explain why our fertility is currently struggling, despite the fact that the global economy has grown over the centuries. I'm going to nerd out on you here, since I was an anthropology minor with an M.A. in sociology; in other words, I've spent LOTS (maybe too much time 😅) thinking about different permutations of family and societal structure across cultures and eras. Buckle in. ;)
And an important disclaimer: most of the old ways I'm about to list here are nothing we should aspire to resurrect (especially the human rights abuses and the less advanced medicine of earlier times). Still, these are a bunch of the factors that facilitated fertility in earlier times:
- The isolated nuclear-family household is a relatively new "invention." As in, mid-20th-century Western invention. By contrast, for most of human history and prehistory, people had vast (unpaid) community help in raising children. "It takes a village" — and they didn't lack for this. So they didn't have to worry so much about who was going to help take care of the kids. It's nice that we've tried to move towards more privacy in our households, but lack of affordable childcare is a fairly unprecedented problem on the scale that we have it now.
- Unfortunately, older societies also had child labor / more kids spending all day on domestic tasks or helping with the family business, instead of going to school. So children weren't just mouths to feed; they were mouths that fed you. Children were seen as an economic boon. Especially in an era when kids themselves were your retirement program. There were tons of economic incentives toward high fertility back then. [To be very clear, we should not return to the child labor / children-as-a-retirement-program model. ;) ]
- At the same time — and also nothing we should try to return to — it used to be perfectly acceptable to sell your child for labor to someone else, or "give" your child away for a lifetime of clergy service (e.g., all those daughters without dowries sent to nunneries) if you reeeeally couldn't afford to keep them. Today, rightfully, we see kids as people to be cared and provided for, and as humans who have the right to make their own choices about work and marriage, rather than as little charges who can be given away to particular employers or sex partners.
- Moreover, people in earlier eras simply had more societal (including religious) pressure to marry quickly, so there wasn't a lot of opportunity to vet partners via a long courtship. Meaning, they unfortunately fell into some marriages that we, today, would consider unhealthy and ill-advised because of this... but this, of course, means they were still having kids in those marriages that, today, might never even have taken place. Hence, again, higher fertility in the past.
- This, combined with more insular societies where the larger family/community played a much bigger role in vetting the partner. There was, in this sense, lots of family-applied pressure on men who got women pregnant out of wedlock to marry them. Or at the very least, lots of pressured the young people not to ghost each other. ;) At the same time, the sense of "My community knows this person and everyone is aware of our courtship" created an aura of security/accountability that we don't have on the same level nowadays in dating, where most prospective partners we will meet are, by contrast, entirely unknown to our families.
- Moreover, the price of healthcare (for sexual health or for children you might raise) wasn't such a deterrent because people simply didn't have much more than herbal remedies or donation-based community healers (in fact, some of my ancestors were these latter types of healers!) until fairly recently anyway. So, healthcare sucked, but at least it wasn't a costly disincentive in cost calculations for partnering up and/or having kids.
- Lastly, the most obvious: lack of access to reliable contraception, coupled with the fact that most women were considered property rather than people; they were OWNED by their husbands and didn't have much choice but to keep having kids. We should absolutely not aspire to that again.
Sorry to nerd out there on you, but I hope those ideas give you some fun food for thought!
