I like your idea of a fertility controller, especially the specific example. Perhaps a woman cannot get pregnant while lactating or for a couple months afterwards, then is back to being able to have babies?
This is more or less the case anyway. Periods might not start up to 6 months or more after giving birth. Fertility is at least diminished while breast feeding and some societies breast feed perhaps up to 2 years partly as birth control. However, neither are very reliable, and you can't fight in a regular army and continue regular breast feeding.
A lot of problems are more to do with the effect of pregnancy on the body. It absolutely wrecks your stomach muscles for starters and doesn't do much for the skeleton either. Everything weakens so they can stretch enough. It normally takes several months training to recover the lost strength (and some of us never managed it). And your priority is the baby.
Without effective birth control it wasn't at all unusual for a girl to marry at 16 (or younger) and then proceed to have a child every 2 years (9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, 9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, repeat till exhausted). What with child care, there's never time in that 15 months for the body to build up strength again.
Start with your fertility control.
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I know that the differences are not written into the game. I want to explain why this is.
Selection bias. You could keep the male/female strength disparity and state that among those who choose to become adventurers, there is little difference in the PDF of strength by gender. There are just fewer female adventurers.
From a biological perspective this will never work. Even if you remove the discrepancies, you're still left with the bambi principle.
A community that looses 50 % of its males and 50% of its females has its reproductive ability cut in half.
A community that looses 90% of its males and 10% of its females has its reproductive capability reduced... by 10% .
Males are the expendable gender, no matter how you look at it. You can throw them into the meat grinder of war and still have the next generation move on (particularly if they leave with one last hurrah)
From a biological perspective this will never work. Even if you remove the discrepancies, you're still left with the bambi principle.
A community that looses 50 % of its males and 50% of its females has its reproductive ability cut in half.
A community that looses 90% of its males and 10% of its females has its reproductive capability reduced... by 10% .
Males are the expendable gender, no matter how you look at it. You can throw them into the meat grinder of war and still have the next generation move on (particularly if they leave with one last hurrah)
This assumes that you are throwing everything you have into the military. Generally, this is not the case. Like IRL medieval militaries, the core of well trained professionals in this world is fairly small compared to the population at large, supported by militia who only serve for short periods. Even with every single militia member called up for a war, that leaves maybe a quarter of a percent of the population in active military service. This world has not developed WW1/WW2 style total war yet. As such, there aren't enough people under arms for the Bambi principle to become problematic. It would take a total war scenario to put enough of the population into the military to have a chance of losing a large percentage of fertile women in combat.
Even if there was a total war scenario, I don't really buy into the Bambi effect. This is because in a total war like WW1 or WW2 (which a total war in this campaign setting would look like due to a high availability of destructive magic and feasibility of aerial bombardment) there are usually at least as many dead civilians as soldiers, if not many, many more. Men are not the only ones dying. Civilian women are, too. That right there challenges the Bambi effect, because the Bambi effect does not assume high civilian casualties, a great many of whom will be women. In effect, it isn't a question of a woman choosing between marching off to war and maybe dying or staying home and living, it's a question of risking death on the battlefield or risking death at home from bombardment or famine.
I like your idea of a fertility controller, especially the specific example. Perhaps a woman cannot get pregnant while lactating or for a couple months afterwards, then is back to being able to have babies?This is more or less the case anyway. Periods might not start up to 6 months or more after giving birth. Fertility is at least diminished while breast feeding and some societies breast feed perhaps up to 2 years partly as birth control. However, neither are very reliable, and you can't fight in a regular army and continue regular breast feeding.
A lot of problems are more to do with the effect of pregnancy on the body. It absolutely wrecks your stomach muscles for starters and doesn't do much for the skeleton either. Everything weakens so they can stretch enough. It normally takes several months training to recover the lost strength (and some of us never managed it). And your priority is the baby.
Without effective birth control it wasn't at all unusual for a girl to marry at 16 (or younger) and then proceed to have a child every 2 years (9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, 9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, repeat till exhausted). What with child care, there's never time in that 15 months for the body to build up strength again.
Start with your fertility control.
Would I be correct to assume that in this infertile period after childbirth a woman could work but not actively fight?
Would I be correct to assume that in this infertile period after childbirth a woman could work but not actively fight?I like your idea of a fertility controller, especially the specific example. Perhaps a woman cannot get pregnant while lactating or for a couple months afterwards, then is back to being able to have babies?This is more or less the case anyway. Periods might not start up to 6 months or more after giving birth. Fertility is at least diminished while breast feeding and some societies breast feed perhaps up to 2 years partly as birth control. However, neither are very reliable, and you can't fight in a regular army and continue regular breast feeding.
A lot of problems are more to do with the effect of pregnancy on the body. It absolutely wrecks your stomach muscles for starters and doesn't do much for the skeleton either. Everything weakens so they can stretch enough. It normally takes several months training to recover the lost strength (and some of us never managed it). And your priority is the baby.
Without effective birth control it wasn't at all unusual for a girl to marry at 16 (or younger) and then proceed to have a child every 2 years (9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, 9 months pregnant, 15 months breastfeeding, repeat till exhausted). What with child care, there's never time in that 15 months for the body to build up strength again.
Start with your fertility control.
You're recovering from a 9 month pregnancy, childbirth, and you have a newborn baby who needs feeding every 3-6 hours and won't sleep through the night for months. Luckily, everyone usually seems to want to help.
You need at least a few weeks off normal work afterwards. If you were relying on breast feeding as a contraceptive, work would have to fit around feeds.I can't really say, I'd have to look up statistics. My first child was born by CS and took longer than average to recover from. My second child, I was looking after a new baby and a 2 year old who promptly caught chickenpox (that was fun). I was unemployed throughout so didn't have a job to go back to. UK maternity laws are probably different to US anyway.