TITLE:
Fertility Patterns and Reproductive Behaviours in the Lutheran and Catholic Populations from Historical Poland
AUTHORS:
Grażyna Liczbińska
KEYWORDS:
Protogenetic and Intergenetic Intervals; Partial Fertility Rate; Relative Cumulative Number of Births; Life Table Biometric Functions; Seasonality of Conceptions and Births
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Anthropology,
Vol.3 No.3,
August
12,
2013
ABSTRACT: Many variables of biological, ecological and cultural nature affect the
biological dynamics of human populations. A religious denomination was an
element of the cultural system which had an impact on the attitude towards
birth control and sexuality. The aim of this paper is to show how religion
shaped the fertility figures in the Catholic and Lutheran populations of
historical Poland. Two methods were used to characterize fertility. One uses
reconstructed individual histories of families to assess fertility figures on
the basis of the length of protogenetic and intergenetic intervals. In the
second method fertility measures were estimated from mortality and natural
increase data. Using life-table parameters estimated for both stationary and
stable population models the following fertility figures were calculated: crude
birth rate, net reproductive rate R0, mean family size, mean birth
interval, total fertility rate, and mean age-specific fertility rate. It has
been found that the analyzed Catholic and Protestant populations from the
territory of historicalPolandwere characterized by a rather high reproductive potential.