I'm curious about multiple pregnancies and sexual desire

[cally]

I was thinking about a world without effective contraception and abortion. A world where everytime you had sex you were either pregnant or likely to become pregnant. I remember how exhausted I was when I was pregnant and a for about a year later. I've never been so tired in my life. So, women essentially lived their adult lives in a state of constant exhaustion. I know some have easier pregnancies but few, if any, women can have multiple pregnancies without health consequences.

So, did women enjoy sex? I think it would be hard to knowing what may happen. If you did have pleasure you may feel guilty because you knew you may have another child that you can't fully support.

Learning that females have as strong a sex drive as men must confuse those who haven't adapted to the changes contraception brought.


If any of you know some articles about this, please let me know.

[geniph]

1. I have no articles, but I can tell you about my mother

She married at 17, then had fifteen pregnancies between then and 31. Her first child, my sister Gale, was born when she was still 17. I was born, the sixth living child, when she was 31. Between having six small children to care for, constant pregnancies, and working full-time, I can tell you she makes no bones about the fact that she hated the whole business. According to my oldest sister, she did her damnedest to induce miscarriage in all her pregnancies, and who can blame her? I certainly don't. A teenage girl shouldn't spend 13 years being continuously pregnant.

I was a post-vasectomy baby. Somehow, between her constant pregnancies and a paternity suit, my father was finally convinced to have the snip, despite being Catholic. However, they forgot to tell him that he wasn't infertile for a period of time following the snip. He didn't believe I was his, and left when I was six weeks old (ironic, isn't it, since he'd had a paternity suit filed against him by another woman?). My mother moved in with her girlfriend and the six of us and had nothing to do with men for 11 years thereafter.

I don't think my mother, to this day, regards heterosexual sex with anything but dread. She did grow weary of having a hidden, closeted lifestyle (this was in the 1960s, when being a lesbian was against the law and certainly would have gotten her fired), and married the first man to ask her, my awful, drunken, violent, child-molesting stepfather. But I also think my stepfather is essentially impotent with grown women, just based on incautious things they've both said. I think the whole business of sex soured for her horribly because of that long 13 years of constant pregnancy.

[Warpy]

2. I know my aunt, mother of 10, feels the same and hates the whole

business. She started asking for help after the sixth. The church (Catholic, of course) was certainly no help and told her to submit, it was gawd's will that her husband couldn't keep his pants zipped and she should spend her whole life pregnant. My grandmother was not much help, had a talk with her husband that he sneered at and bragged about ignoring. After the tenth, her Catholic OB-Gyn realized sex and childbirth were killing her and gave her a hysterectomy over the outraged objections of the parish priest.

The fertility rate plummeted in the next generation, even though most of them remained practicing Catholics.

[FloridaPat]

3. The old books talk of a woman's duty and a man's right.

That should give you a hint of what the general status was.