ABSTRACT
The new religion of the eighteenth century was science, and just as the older faiths had made women's sexuality central to the order of things, so did many of the practitioners of the new science. In the eighteenth century the vast majority of deaths occurred among children under the age of ten. In the Ottoman Empire having children out of wedlock was associated primarily with slave concubines, who, as we have seen, gained certain rights by becoming pregnant, though fewer than would have accrued to a 'real' wife. Early modern childbirth undoubtedly was sometimes an occasion for networking and reaffirming secret or semi-secret married women's sexual and reproductive knowledge. The deliberate killing or abandonment of infants had long been frowned upon by pious people of all the main European and Middle Eastern religious traditions. The demographic transition is often represented as an almost mystical affair, where unwitting people somehow changed their reproductive behaviour and that changed the world.
