Rudolph Binion Repies

First fact, Lloyd, then theory. Europe’s large-scale marital birth control did not begin with “the most evolved parents.” No measurable variables whatever consistently distinguished the early starters. The monographic literature on this point is abundant and conclusive. Paul, if the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply “made far better sense on the farm than in the city,” how come the peasantry took the contraceptive lead as often as not? As for the rubber condom, Norman, its causality has been written off long since. Ancient Rome depopulated without it. So did the Americans and the French take the fertility plunge without it following their two great political revolutions. When birth control, extramarital since antiquity, went domestic across Europe beginning in the 1870s, mechanical devices and abortion only brought up the rear behind withdrawal and especially abstinence, imposed by wives as a rule and abetted by prostitution: one less intercourse in ten and the transition was irreversibly on.