I don’t think most women wanted to be pregnant back to back like that then.
My grandmother had 16 children. It destroyed her.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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I'm a tenth child and my mom did it of her own volition. It was like being a dog that nobody wanted to take care of.
I'm sorry you were forced to be in that position.
My dad was number 14. He was once asked for advice by a man who had several children already and wanted more. My dad's advice?
"Stop."
My dad went on to explain that this guy was already neglecting his current children and that it was abuse to continue. Because there simply isn't enough time and resources available.
My oldest sister wanted to do the same. My brother in law got a vasectomy in secret after the 7th. Everything your dad said is exactly true.
Edit: I don't mean to imply that some women aren't forced into the position of having more kids than they want. But usually having a lot of kids requires two mentally unwell religious fundamentalists.
Oh you're totally right that there's people who willingly do this as well! Thankfully we have more choices when it comes to how many children we want these days.
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Maybe it's just cuz I've got a neurospicy bean who is AuDHD and PDA af, but I do not understand how people can have more than a couple kids. Hell, my wife is the oldest of 5 and it's crazy how much abuse I now see they all endured (both neglect and actual SA abuse of the youngest ones that wasn't brought to light until a few years ago).
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Yeah definitely the elephant in the room when this comes up. Women didn’t have a choice and they were impregnated over and over even if it killed them.
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They needed workers. Not pictured is the shallow grave out back for the 4 that got the rickets
And the "orphan train" already passed by, so it's not pictured either. Or the "for sale" signs when the children became too many. But the chimney sweep kids are "living it up", as they're learning an important trade!
But the chimney sweep kids are “living it up”, as they’re learning an important trade!
The cancers those chimney sweep kids got were horrific. Last Podcast on the Left recently did a deep dive into chimney sweeps and it was eye-opening. Highly recommend listening if you're into that kind of thing.
I was just recommending a podcast episode lol
Sorry, sorry... that was sarcasm. It was mostly slavery of orphans, guised as trade-skills. As well as the cancers, they also had hellish injury/death, because ya know... 7 year olds are climbing chimneys
"Put their feet to the fire"... sometimes kids were too afraid to keep climbing, so they lit a fire under them. Sometimes, they became too grown and got stuck in the chimney, possibly dying. Hellish
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I had the fortunate experience of growing up with great-grandparents living, as well as some of their siblings. I got to hear first-hand experiences from 3 generations of women (mother, grandmothers, and two great-grandmothers plus various aunts sprinkled in). It was invaluable for me. Knowing their life stories and the truth of what they endured has helped me navigate life in so many ways.
It also has been incredible armor against the flood of misplaced nostalgia and outright manipulation of history that seems so prevelant. My great-grandmother was born in 1908 and died in 2002. She left her abusive husband in the 1930s and raised her kids as a single mom in a time when it was exponentially more difficult to do so. Glad she got out when she did with 4 instead of 14...
When I hear of the women in the victorian times who worked as sex workers to get by, got hacked into pieces by Jack the Ripper and no one batted an eye when they heard a woman screaming as that's just what London was like at the time....
... I know there's a lot of unwritten history that wildly deviates from the conservative mindset, and always has.
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The food bill for those kids today would be pretty close to the median gross income in USA.
Good thing that the father has a stable job at the gas station to support his family.
Or they owned a farm, and 7 or 8 of those kids are already doing significant amounts of farm labor to earn their food. The economics of having tons of kids is radically different when they go from being a cost to a profit in 8ish years instead of from a cost to not a budget item in hopefully 22 if you're lucky.
The US school calendar was based on the realities of this. So was the election schedule, voting on a Tuesday aligns neatly with the schedules of farmers bringing goods to the nearest town for market.
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How many of those old kids were acting as parents because the folks were too busy fucking?
The two oldest, seated in front, are tending two newborn babies. Presumably the parents are off somewhere else, fucking.
They didn't think about it they just did it.
I came from a big family like that. My mother had 13 children and 11 of us survived long enough to get married and start our own families. Lost one sister to fibroids and another to gang violence.
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Being fair to women back then, most of them didn't know how sex and babies worked, lacked any sort of formal education besides knowing how to read and write, and were raised that disagreeing with your husband or saying no to him in the bedroom was how to wind up an old spinster, the worst fate for any woman.
"Honey, if I knew what was causing it, I would never have had more than two."
-My great grandma, mother of 12
They legitimately didn't understand that sex resulted in pregnancy?
That seems unlikely to be true unless they were raised very religious and not in any proximity to farm animals or pets.
Religious, yes. But very much on a farm.
So she knew if the farm animals had sex they'd become pregnant?
She lived on the farm, but she didn't work it; that's what the male children were for. Her "place" was in the house.
She told me she would ask sometimes, but all anybody would ever tell her was some variation of, "Birds fly. Fish swim. Women have babies. That's just what they do/That's just the way it is."
She finally found out from her doctor while discussing her hysterectomy, but only after confirming her husband was already dead.
Not until after menopause. She was born in the rural US American south some time in the 1920s (the date is known, I just forget). She grew up during the great depression, never went to school, only knew what she learned from her mother, who lived the same way, and only socialized with other women at church, who also lived and grew up the same way. She could read and count well enough to follow a recipe and write enough to leave her husband a note, but that was about it. She was raised to believe that if she said no to her husband in the bedroom, he would divorce her, word would spread around town that she wasn't a "good woman" and she would end up an old spinster, the worst thing a woman could possibly be.
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Before modern medicine, often people would have a ton of kids because they would frequently die.
Before modern medicine, often people would have a ton of kids because they would frequently die.
Before modern medicine, birth control and abortions were much harder to come by, too.
Also, women didn't really get much of a say in the matter.
God forbid you point that out though, there's a bunch of people who think this was all consensual.
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If you teach women about their bodies and give them the choice, they will have fewer children.
This is why conservatives are anti-sex ed and anti-abortion.
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That's what happens when a wife is not allowed to say no and birth control doesn't exist. Could also represent having sex only 15 times over 16 years and getting pregnant every time. My grandmother swore all my grandfather needed to do was look at her and she was pregnant yet again.
To be fair, I don't think grandma pumped out 252 children because she enjoyed the sex.
My grandmother had her first child out of wedlock at the age of 14, her second child (my mom) out of wedlock with a different father at the age of 16, and her third child out of wedlock with yet another different father at the age of 17. And this was all in the 1930s. I strongly suspect grandma really enjoyed the sex -- otherwise, why go through all the social approbation and abandonment by her family that went along with it?
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I love being childless.
I love children ... in 15 minute doses. That's why being a childless school bus driver is so great.
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That’s like 2 decades of pushing out kids.
Eight survived...
I expect my wife to have more sex with me than once every 10 months
My dad is 70 and he was the youngest of 14 kids…
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