So when Senator Vance and the pope — among many others, of course — express concern about women today not having children, they aren’t comparing us to a past that actually existed. In ancient Rome, women used things like beeswax, olive-oil-soaked cloth or even halved lemons to block their cervices before having sex. From medieval Europe to colonial America, women would have used an array of herbs to attempt to end pregnancies. Nearly 16 percent of white women and 13 percent of Black women born in 1870 had no children; of all American women born between 1900 and 1910, 20 percent never did. Some of them, maybe even many of them, were actively avoiding having children.

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