Fertility

Fertility and Fecundity

Demographers attribute grave importance to the difference between fertility and fecundity. In this distinction, fertility is the actual number of children born in a population, and fecundity is the potential for reproduction. Fertility awareness techniques are personal negotiations between fertility and fecundity. They consist of information; for example, that the ovule is fertile for 48 hours and that once sperm is inside the uterus, it survives for two to three days. Yet, fertility-related technologies such as contraceptives, birth control methods, and infertility treatments are wiping out the lines between fertility and infertility.

The term fertility is commonly used in further terms such as fertility decline, fertility/demographic transition, and fertility rate, which are all interconnected. It is also used in the definition of fertility cults, which is the subject of a mythographic history rather than demography. However, recent research connects the two and depicts, for instance, ancient Rome as a time and place where contraceptives were used and a certain fertility transition was experienced. It is argued that female healers and the gendered knowledge they embodied disappeared by the Renaissance. Thus, everything they knew had to be learned again, resulting in the cultivated ignorance on fertility that prevailed in the West thereafter.

These developments that point to transformations in the history of fertility perception also require the pursuit of this history in different geographies, which are grouped here as Christian and non-Christian, developed and underdeveloped, and Communist and non-Communist countries. Whereas the first group refers to a division on abortion, the second group is divided on the usage of eugenics and systematized family planning programs in relation to the regulation of fertility. The last group is divided on the visibility of both the direct effects of fertility regulations on women and the direct relationship between fertility rates and female employment. All these divisions make sense in relation to the increasing importance of population in the forming of nations. Fertility regulation is one of the main pillars of modernization.

Fertility Cults and Goddesses

The definitions of fertile periods as well as fertility and infertility have a background as old as the history of humanity, throughout which the meaning of fertility has changed radically. The earliest examples of discussions of fertility cults, mother goddesses, and earth mothers are the Woman of Willendorf (24,000–22,000 B.C.E.) and clay female figurines giving birth (7400–6000 B.C.E.) in Catalhöyük. Fertility goddesses from different cultures around the world followed these ancient figurines. They were partially absorbed by Abrahamic religions and their reinventions in neo-paganism.

...