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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 2861790" data-attributes="member: 5328">In the days of high birthrate and high infant mortality it was typical for a lower-class woman (ie. without access to contraceptives, and not in a position to tell her husband to go see his mistress, and not drinking wine sweetened with lead acetate) to have 12 to 20 pregnancies between the ages of puberty and menopause, if she survived that long. Take 15 as an average, and call that one every two years. 3/4 of a year per preganancy. So figure that 3/8 of all married women between fifteen and forty-five are pregnant at any typical time.50% of the population are probably women. 50% of those are under 15, leaving 25%. 3/8 of 25% is about 9%, and you ought to consider that an absolute upper bound.Looking at it the other way, the average life expectancy at birth is probably about thirty years. If the population is neither shrinking nor growing, the crude birth rate has to be about 3.3% of the population, 6.7% of women, 13.3% of women over the age of puberty, suggesting a pregnancy rate of 10% of women of child-bearing age at any particular time.So there you are. The proportion of the total population that is pregnant at any particular time must be somewhere between 2.5% of the population (the minimum necessary to prevent population decline, given an average life expectancy of thirty years) and 9% (the maximum that human fertility will in practice allow).The proportion of women of child-bearing age who are pregnant at any time must be somewhere between 13.3% (the minimum to prevent the population declining at an average life expectancy of 30) and 37.5% (the practical limit of human fertility).</blockquote>

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