ABSTRACT
Heavy reliance on abortion in family planning is assumed to have its roots in the pre-1945 period, reaching back as far as the Tokugawa era (1600-1868). Western economic historians, such as Susan Hanley, Kozo Yamamura and Thomas Smith,4 have argued that Japanese families of the Tokugawa period used abortion and infanticide not only to limit the number of children, but to regulate spacing between them and the number and/or order of the sexes of their children. In particular, they have found that it was middle-level farming families as well as samurai who carried out such practices, leading to the conclusion that abortion and infanticide were methods of family planning rather than means of survival for poor families.
