From Pennyroyal to Mifepristone: What Demographers Missed about Birth Control?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades some historians have found that premodern Western people employed a variety of birth controls while they exercised a degree of control over their reproduction. Reacting to this claim, prominent demographers contend there was no discernable birth control until about the 1890s. For over three millennia, herbal menstrual regulators were likely the most widely used birth control means. Historians examined medical, legal, anecdotal, and other sources in regions in Spain, modern Greece, Ireland, Australia, the United States, Canada, Peru, and the Caribbean islands primarily from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Demographers' claims are misguided. Menstrual regulators tors worked for the purposes intended. They gave women choices and were mostly silently executed. Some herbal regulators constrained exactly the same compound as our modern birth-control drug.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".