Our ancestors did not ask whether they preferred children to a larger condo and a Caribbean vacation. Whether they raised children out of love or obligation, we shall never know, for they never asked this sort of question. We do not know of a single case of fertility failure in a traditional society, that is, a society in which most people worked the land for subsistence. But traditional society is fragile. In the ancient world, as we shall see, infertility arrived with the Spartan warrior-state in which citizens practiced arms while slaves farmed, and with the Athenian imperial state where
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