| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: Using the method of Louis Henry on a sample of 120 women, who were married by age 29, remained in a marriage up until the end of their fertily period, and lived in the years between 1660 and 1850 in the village of Břevnov, now a neighbourhood in the city of Prague, the study looked at the length of the intervals between births among this group of women. The information revealed that one-fifth to one-fourth of the intervals between births in the sample of women exceeded 31 months. In his historical-demographic studies E. A. Wrigley considered any interval among women in the European historical populations aged between 20 and 30 years that was longer than 31,5 months to be "abnormally" long. What role in this "abnormality" could have been played by spontaneous or even criminal abortions? Historical demography is able to ascertain the proportion of pregnancies terminated otherwise than in the birth of the child out of the total number of pregnancies only for just under the last half century of population development in the Czech lands, when the number of births and documented abortions have been made available. That deeper demographic and sociological analysis of the long-term development of fertility in the Central European population is warranted lies in the fact that less than one century after the publication in Prague of an article by the Czech writer and journalist Teréza Nováková, who in 1905 wrote, "that statistics offer a record of only a very small percentage of the human embryos destroyed", according to official reports one-third of documented pregnancies in the Czech Republic end in abortion or miscarriage. |
