The Demography of Roman Italy by Saskia Hin & Saskia Hin

Author:Saskia Hin & Saskia Hin [Hin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

5.4. Why have a child if you can? The desirability of children

To summarize the preceding argument: Roman men and women could adopt several alternative strategies to support marriage and childbearing, even if their economic means were limited. But why should we assume in the first place that people wanted to make the effort to reproduce and to circumvent whatever stumbling blocks they may have encountered? We cannot simply make this assumption, especially given the indications of fertility-limiting measures and the rhetorical and moralistic complaints in ancient literary sources about adults who failed to reproduce. We have already seen that infanticide and abandonment were integrated aspects of daily life. Brunt was right to state that lack of economic means or the threat of diminishing them through (further) childbearing prompted some people to kill their newborns or to abandon children, either to be found by others or not. After all, another child is another mouth to feed. Poverty appears several times in the ancient sources as a motivation for abstaining from rearing offspring.85 References to plants and drugs described as contraceptive or abortifacient are also well-represented in ancient medical literature, and some can be shown to be (partially) effective.86 While all of these measures were employed, the extent to which they affected the direction of population trends is another matter. Clearly they could only have done so if their prevalence suddenly increased significantly. I have demonstrated in detail elsewhere why it would have taken more than difficult economic circumstances to trigger a dramatic, structural downward shift in birth rates in Roman Italy.87 In the following sections, I briefly summarize my arguments for thinking that children remained a desirable asset even for poor Roman citizens.

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