Abstract
Just 25 years ago Louis Henry (1961) wrote a paper entitled ‘Some data on natural fertility’ that appeared in the Eugenics Quart. in which he refined a definition of ‘natural fertility’ as a concept in demography. Demographers, in using the term subsequently, have in general tended to presume that it relates to fertility in the absence of parity dependent controls. At almost the same moment, Ansley Coale at the Office of Population Research in Princeton initiated a project to study the decline of marital fertility in the several hundred provinces of Europe, a process that started with certain notable exceptions, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. More specifically, this project was concerned to document the process whereby Europeans moved, employing Henry’s terminology, from a state of ‘natural’ to ‘controlled’ fertility. That project has very recently produced what is sure to become known as its ‘summary’ volume which contains a body of data that allow us for the first time to view, in considerable detail, the variations in so called ‘natural fertility’ before parity dependent control became both geographically and socially extensive (Coale and Watkins, 1986).
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© 1988 The Eugenics Society
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Smith, R.M. (1988). Natural Fertility in Pre-industrial Europe. In: Diggory, P., Potts, M., Teper, S. (eds) Natural Human Fertility. Studies in Biology, Economy and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09961-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09961-0_5
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