Apologies to anybody who doesn’t want to read about omegaverse. You can just skip this. It’s just me coming up with an unreasonable number of potential plot/setting ideas based on how the little buggers procreate.
(It’s stupid how much mileage I can get out of an idea as ridiculous as omegaverse. My brain, ladies and gentlemen.)
So, in a lot of Omegaverse fic, the conception rate for alpha/omega sex during heat is, like, 99%. And I was thinking…how do you prevent overpopulation in that case? Because without birth control (and we did not evolve with birth control, so we have to pretend the body has, and I regret this phrasing, ways of shutting that shit down) the population would fucking explode. So, if you’re going to keep that conception rate, options:
- Heats are relatively infrequent, such as 2-3 a year (the number for dogs)
- High infant mortality rate (unlikely to still be a problem in the modern age)
- Very high miscarriage rate
- No cultural concept of purely recreational sex (HAHA no this is porn fuck that)
- Or we lower the chance of conception.
I know in some ‘verses (e.g. Fresne’s), they solve it with having roughly 1/3 of the population infertile betas. Thoughts?
I’m not sure it’s a problem, really. I mean:
- Assuming RL pregnancy length, an omega can still only have one kid every year or two. (They don’t litter, after all, except of course for those versions where they do.)
- If you assume that both men and women can be a/b/o, then even if the population is evenly divided, that’s still only 1/3 of the population that’s child-bearing.
- If you don’t assume that a/b/o is limited to either men or women, then omegas become quite a small portion of the population (1/6 at best), and probably less than that, given that they probably play a minor role in the survival of the species in a world with a thriving, normally functional female population.
- Until the past 100 years or so, it’s always been rough to have/be a child. Except in highly industrialized societies (which have access to birth control), the early mortality rate remains a factor to contend with. In fact, research indicates that the human drive toward procreation seems to be tied into early mortality rate. The higher it is, the more inclined people are to have large families. (HUGE generalization, of course, of an issue that still requires a lot more study to figure out just what’s going on there, but the two have been shown to be distinctly linked.)
- In every omegaverse story I’ve read, there’s always the option of just not having sex. The usual trope is that the omega in question plans to just hunker down and see to matters by themselves for a few days.
Mind you, in mine (where omegas =/= women), I just didn’t make conception a guaranteed thing. Actually there are a bunch of factors going into fertility rates for omegas (and women, for that matter):
- The more times the omega gets it on with somebody during his heat, the better the chances
- Fertility rates with partners are highest with alpha, lowest with a fellow omega
- Having multiple partners can actually drive the chances down (sperm wars!)
So the highest chance of pregnancy is if an omega spends his entire heat getting bred by the same alpha, assuming he doesn’t use birth control. Then you’re probably looking at very high odds. But by no means does that mean every omega in the world, let alone every omega every time.
But other ways of handling it could be that omegas in societies with healthy populations and stable lifestyles find themselves going into heat less often or for shorter duration. Or maybe they just become less fertile. Or alphas or whomever become less fertile. Or in stable, industrialized nations that are content with their level of population growth, they make a practice of making birth control/contraception readily available. Or maybe it’s a sex ed. thing, where a mated alpha/omega pair learns how to manage heats in ways that keep them from ending up with a 12 kid family (sex toys? semen bladders? spermacidal substances?).
Could be a competitive thing, where alphas (and maybe some stronger betas) fight over who gets the right to mate with an omega, so despite the fact that theoretically you could have a population explosion, in practice it doesn’t manifest because an omega doesn’t always get mated. Or, in a more civilized society where people don’t do barbaric things like break into fistfights in the streets, omegas aren’t always getting mated with people who have superior sex-powered genes.
Or you could go scarier/dystopian with it, where there is a population overgrowth or the government has put forward measures to prevent one, so that omegas who get pregnant without authorization are punished. Or alphas who get omegas pregnant without authorization are punished. Or omegas have to report to a containment facility for their heat so as to avoid problems, or maybe they’re fitted with a chastity belt for the purpose (in a nicer setting, they’re handed out to the omega so they can protect themselves; in a worse one, they don’t get the choice of whether to use it). Or people get their genes tested when they reach adulthood, and if they don’t pass a certain benchmark, they’re rendered surgically infertile.
Of course, you could also just decide that the proportion of omegas in the population is lower.