Sometimes, I hear stories from friends and others that say they’ve had “four kids in six years!“ or something like that. This got me thinking, though. Hypothetically, how many kids could a woman have in her lifetime?
Let’s say that the woman could only give birth between the puberty to menopause. (That eliminates the freak cases of five-year-olds giving birth and seventy-year-olds giving birth.
The average age of puberty is 11, and the average age of menopause is 51. That’s forty years of child bearing goodness! Okay, this hypothetical woman would get pregnant, give birth in exactly nine months, and immediately get pregnant again.
And, here are the odds of “weird births” (like twins). (Oh, and we’re assuming that there are no fertility drugs involved, so no 8-kid litters).
“natural” Twins (“natural” as in without fertility drugs) are a 1 in 60 chance.
“natural” triplets are 1 in 8,100
“natural” quads are 1 in 729,000
“natural” quints are 1 in 55,000,000
The chances of a baby being stillborn is 1 in 115
I came up with 55 kids. DAMN! But my calculating methods are less than, well, exact. Can anyone else come up with something interesting?
I would’ve thought that in most cases there would be a point where the woman’s “lifetime” would be in an inverse relationship to the number of children she gave birth too. In so far as the stress on her body would mean that after a certain number of births she would see her life expectancy decline as she continued to get pregnant.
Also, it’s recommended that women wait 2-4 weeks after giving birth to have sex again. Plus, ovulation would need to start again. If a woman is breastfeeding - she may not ovulate for weeks, months…or until she stops nursing totally. I still wasn’t ovulating for 2 months after I stopped nursing Jocelynn (when she was 11 mos. old). But my friend’s mom said that approximately 6 weeks after the birth of the baby…her cycle started right back up again & she typically nursed her children for about 18 months. She had 7 kids.
And if a birth was complicated & needed a c-section the recovery time is longer. AND, if a woman has a c-section, it’s likely a doctor would recommend c-sections for following births…there would be a limit to how many times the doctor can safely cut into the uterus. Also…as scar tissue develops, it weakens the uterus & it becomes less able to carry a fetus to term. I spoke w/ a doctor though who said he sucessfully delivered 14 babies by c-section for one woman.
I think there are too many variables to accurately guess this. But…continue on, it’s interesting none-the-less.
Yeah—dairy cows will wear out and so I don’t see why human females wouldn’t wear out, too.
The other factor that you haven’t taken into consideration is that Mother Nature has her own ways of spacing out births. For example, one’s chances of getting pregnant are considerably lower if one is breast feeding a baby. It’s not perfect, which is why people who definitely want to space their kids out need to take further precautions, but it’s pretty effective. I’ve read that in non-nomadic societies, children tend to be about two years apart on average, but in nomadic societies, it’s more like four years. I may not have those averages exactly right, but I believe I’m pretty close.
Also, women whose bodies are under stress are less likely to become pregnant as well. I would think caring for, say, 10 or 12 kids is at least as stressful as anything else.
What you really need, I think, is some kind of historical data on how many children women tend or tended to have in societies that used no form of birth control and in which having lots of babies was encouraged. But it can be frustrating to try to solve these intimate little puzzles from history because even if the society was one that had a form of writing, that doesn’t mean there are any records that can answer this question. Societies don’t generally, as far as I know, keep track of how many stillbirths each woman had, how many found a way to abort a baby that they couldn’t care for, how many practiced non-technical forms of birth control such as withdrawl or some kind of pre-condom barrier or just telling hubby “no,“ or any of that stuff. So there are a lot of things that we just don’t know.
My mom had ten of us (no twins) within about a 13 year span. She was definitely still fecund when she decided enough was enough. She also started at the relatively late age of 22.
Nameless, ask your parents to explain menopause to you.
The “birth interval” for humans is more varied than the other great apes. For orangutans, it’s 6-7 years; for gorillas it’s 3.5-4.5 years; for chimpanzees it’s 3-6 years; for bonobos it’s around 4.8 years. For humans, birth interval is something like 1 to 6 years. (Though I personally have known two different women whose second birth came more than 10 years after the first.)
Also, it’s recommended that women wait 2-4 weeks after giving birth to have sex again. Plus, ovulation would need to start again. If a woman is breastfeeding - she may not ovulate for weeks, months…or until she stops nursing totally.
WoHo don’t count on either of these. First, I never waited to have sex though the doctor said a week AND I got pregnant while nursing my oldest (both breasts at a time so I had a LOT of milk) because I believed that nursing would prevent me from getting pregnant right away. I continued to nurse even though I was pregnant by three months.
I had three children one year apart. I selected to have a tubligation and was still very young. I’d have been one of those that had a child a year until I just died in childbirth. Yes, childbirth takes an enormous tole on the human body, for as natural as it may be, it is significantly depleting to women.
Hypothetically, how many kids could a woman have in her lifetime?
You’re not planning on testing to find out?
One thing I’ve noticed is with mothers who have lots of children is that when they have twins or triplets or other multiple births, they’ll sometimes do that repeatedly. They might have two sets of twins, for example. I think that some mothers might have a genetic predisposition (or something like that) for such things. And having a tendency to have triplets would certainly boost your number of possible offspring.
You know Acci, you’re right so, now I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be easier to just have a litter ONE time and be done with it? What is the number of babies born to one woman at one time anyway? I mean, even with fertility drugs?
