I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn't readily available.
There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.
There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.
Where there's incentives, they'll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.
Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn't have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.
At the same time as not contraception, infant mortality was ridiculously high. To the point that people that high estimates put the IMR at about 1/3.
There’s a reason people married young historically- they needed to start getting kids popping out. Or at least that was the mentality. More kids meant more stability and safety. Kids were free labor, the first male would inherit most or everything so that wasn’t really a problem. So they popped out a lot because the first five years were… awful.
I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn't readily available.
There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.
There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.
Where there's incentives, they'll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.
Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn't have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.
At the same time as not contraception, infant mortality was ridiculously high. To the point that people that high estimates put the IMR at about 1/3.
There’s a reason people married young historically- they needed to start getting kids popping out. Or at least that was the mentality. More kids meant more stability and safety. Kids were free labor, the first male would inherit most or everything so that wasn’t really a problem. So they popped out a lot because the first five years were… awful.