At the first of two recent PET events on depopulation (see BioNews 1283, 1285 and 1286), the demographer Dr Paul Morland mentioned that he had taken part in a discussion on this subject with Lionel Shriver. 'For a novelist', he said, 'she takes a great deal of interest in these matters.' Perhaps Dr Morland has stats on the novelist population that I'm not familiar with, but to me the surprise here is not her but him. Because one of the things that novels do, like fictional productions more generally, is contribute in their own brilliant ways to ongoing cultural arguments. See Netflix's Adolescence – it got everyone talking.

Rewind a century and more, and in 1896 we have the world-famous French novelist Émile Zola writing an article entitled... 'Dépopulation'. Then, as now, the falling birthrate was a high-profile topic of European debate. Zola supported the aim of increasing the population, but thought that the means proposed by a new pronatalist group were misguided. You don't, he argued, raise the birthrate through fiscal measures to ease the cost of living for hardworking families. What's needed, instead, is positive images of parenthood. But where are these positive images? The plots of novels are all about adultery, without a baby in sight. Literature these days is full of girlish youths and boy-bodied women, he said – no wonder the birthrate is plummeting!

Zola wrote the pronatalist novel himself. Fécondité ('Fertility'), published in 1899, is in effect an extended advertisement for baby-making. Centred on a huge and ever-expanding happy family, it is a celebration of the pleasures of procreation. And it is also, just as strongly, a denunciation of all the bad practices that work against that.

Chief among those is contraception, which Zola called 'la fraude': it is cheating nature. In the 1890s, contraception, newly available to those who can pay to access it, is part of the widespread public argument about a declining birthrate. Sex for non-reproductive ends – for personal pleasure – is considered not just wrong but perverse, as is any deliberate thwarting of natural reproduction. In that vein, another new campaigning organisation at the time – the Ligue pour la Régénération Humaine (League for Human Regeneration) – was dedicated to lowering rather than raising the birthrate, in the name of the 'neo-Malthusian' thinking which would later be called eugenics.

Today, it is taken for granted that the turn-of-the-century eugenics movement was headed in dangerous directions – the default condemnation of eugenics is the mirror image of our default acceptance of contraception. But in the 1890s and early 1900s, those two were seen as comparable. Contraception is a technology for the control of human reproduction, which is exactly what eugenics promotes. From this point of view, then, Zola's opposition to contraception aligns him with the rejection of eugenics. And Fécondité makes no distinctions of class or race in its indiscriminate advocacy of natural parenthood. All birth is welcome and wonderful.

But it is not a matter of deciding, one way or the other, whether Zola was right or wrong. Should our own views of contraception or eugenics be corrected? On the other hand, must we stop reading Zola because he had such clearly unacceptable views? The point is rather that there can be no straightforward evaluation of a historical constellation of ideas from a later point in their evolution, with a changed ideological context of contestation and consensus. What is valuable, instead, is to see with what different connections and cultural associations an idea that we take for granted was advocated or challenged, at an earlier moment of its history. Just as the birthrate is once again up for argument now in the twenty-first century, so the curious case of contraception – which isn't – can indicate how ideas that we think we know may show up quite differently in past historical connections.

No one in 2025 is mounting a general critique of contraception. That would be, quite literally, unthinkable. But many features of Fécondité's presentation of the abuses of modern reproductive and contra-reproductive arrangements closely resemble critiques and exposés of the twenty-first-century fertility business. There is a celebrity obstetrician, for instance, whose experimental operations are reported in the papers. There are clinics and doctors that profit from women prepared to try anything, at any cost, that may give them a chance of having a child of their own; while at the same time, equally active enterprises and individuals exploit women with the opposite desperate need to get rid of a baby. One business, run by a Madame Rouche, caters for both these extremes; she has added to her stillborns speciality by marketing a supposedly infallible drug to combat chronic infertility.

On the patient side, there is the roller-coaster experience of a woman desperate to get pregnant, and 'broken by the continual alternation of hope and despair'. Always looking for the latest add-ons, she 'scans the newspapers every morning in search of advertisements for a new remedy or the address of some questionable enterprise where they made their profits from infertile mothers in the same way that others made theirs from over-fertile mothers'. There is a case of counter-reproductive tourism in the person of a mysterious English woman called Amy, who keeps coming back to give birth one more time (and then give up the child) at the more upmarket of the novel's two featured maternity homes.

Knowing the outline of Zola's own life in the years before Fécondité, the personal meanings of its idealisation of parental love and all things procreative come through. Lovingly married for many years, he and his wife Alexandrine were childless. But as a teenager, before she met Émile, Alexandrine had had a baby, given up for adoption. That baby, they both now knew, had later died. Émile, for his part, had recently had two children with another woman, Jeanne Rozerot, and was privately full of the joys of a late-found fatherhood. So now, in the 1890s, Zola's wife is a woman whose own baby, long ago, died, and whose husband has had children with someone else.

In some of his novel's scenarios, Zola suggests the complexities of emotion and connection involved in the extraordinary real story of his and Alexandrine's long life as non-parents together despite each of them, separately, having had children of their own. Stranger than fiction; birth stories beyond the stats.

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Professor Rachel Bowlby is author of the book Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life. Buy this book from Amazon UK.