[Granville-Hough] 23 Jul 2009 - History Mystery - Natural Birth Control

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

How many people on earth have the same
birthday I do?  Logically, it would be several million, 1/365th of the
world's population.  But it does not quite come out that way.  Some
periods of the year are more favored than others.   Consider diet,
availability of food, and customs, we could suggest that when women are
more healthy and feeling well, they tend to get pregnant more readily.
But it probably goes back to a time when the mother wanted the child to
be born when there was plenty of high protein food  The Eskimos at Thule
had a sex free-for-all for two weeks in August.  Any children born would
come in the next April or May when the seals were plentiful and the
mother would be able to breast-feed the child.  The only baby food being
what the mother
chewed up and put in the baby's mouth, they breast fed their
children to ages three or four.  They only got pregnant about once
every four years during periods of non-lactation.

I remember the case of a tenant farmer's wife who did not want a
second child.  She suckled her son until he was seven years old, and he
was old enough to be embarassed by the activity and talked openly about
it to his schoolmates.  It became a subject of community chatter and
cluck clucking.  The boy finally refused to suckle any more.  I cannot
say his mother got pregnant again.  This all happened when older brother
Dueward was classmate to the boy involved.  I got the story second-hand
from him, with confirmation from my mother.  Only when I learned about
the Eskimo activities did I understand about natural birth control.