Historically were women petrified of being pregnant due to childbirth?

[Buttercupsandpoppys]

As the title says. Mortality rates weren’t great with so many women dying during labour.

I know there was so much pressure to have children as a women. In period dramas and books/films you see women desperate to ‘provide sons’. But if they knew death was so likely, wouldn’t they be petrified at the very thought of pregnancy?

im suprised history isn’t full of women just point blank refusing sex/marriage and all having to be publicly dragged kicking and screaming knowing pregnancy was practically a flipping of the coin between life and death.

I honestly think I’d have tried any and every trick in the book to avoid it. Even making myself as unattractive as possible so no kind would wish to marry me!

Anyone have any knowledge of this?

It wasn't just giving birth that killed women . Post partum infection was a killer too (perhaps the most famous being queen Jane Seymour).

Poor Irish Catholic families had huge numbers of children. My grandparents (born around 1910) were each one of 10 or 12 which was not unusual. In fact, my parents and PIL (next generation down) have 30 siblings among the 4 of them!
Breastfeeding was frowned upon here I believe, by the Church, perhaps in order to make women stop sooner and thus have more babies.
It was seen as a status symbol to have a nun or priest in the family.
Protestant families in Ireland had far fewer children.

Large families are largely a 19th/20 thing. Catholics certainly generally had bigger families than Protestants which suggests Protestants took a different approach.

Being a spinster was often really tough economically, emotionally& culturally because you didn't have a husband & children to support you & you didnt fit into how society was organised, unless you were lucky or clever at finding a role. Not sure about accepting children would die. Ovbiously they were aware of high mortality so they accepted that that was the reality but they expressed great gratitude when children survived and they were very upset when children died, as devastated as we are.

They were but as they were more religious at the time it was "well if I die it is god's will" etc.

If you read the letters & diaries of the time I don't think that mean they were any less devastated.

I always refer back to Martha Ballard on this topic, and the sheer number of times she memorialised her dead children when she wrote her diary, and recorded their ages down to the day.

Honestly, recommended reading for anyone interested in family life and childbirth c1800: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 'The Life of Martha Ballard based on her Diary, 1785-1812'. She was in the US (Maine) but the fine grain of family life is so vivid and relatable.

Elizabeth I is an example of someone who didn’t marry. This was one of the reasons. The other was of course she didn’t want to be told what to do by a man.

I was very ill when my first child was born but it didn’t stop me having two more children. Perhaps the natural desire to reproduce overcomes alot of the fear. It wasn’t that I wasn’t frightened just that the desire to have another child was stronger. .

All I know is that the standard age between children in pre history is thought to have been four years. Breast feeding until the child was 3 would account for this. Such an age gap would have prevented the multiple pregnancies that occurred in later generations and may well have meant fewer infant deaths.

You also, thanks to reliable contraceptives being available, could choose whether to have your children

Some women will historically have wanted kids and others will have had kids they didn't want. All married women will have had them unless infertile because of contraception being unreliable and marital rape being legal. When you can't say "no", your "yes" is meaningless.

I think the data shows maternal mortality in ft labour without intervention is around 1/100 births. Of course if a woman had ten pregnancies leading to birth her odds of dying due to complications increased to 1/10

no, even if your 1/100 were accurate (it’s not, it’s 1/1000) that’s not how probability maths work.

Grief isn’t a luxury, you can’t measure the amount of grieving someone feels by how many days off work they get from the company/government.

Just not having kids has always been an option- that’s what monasteries and nunneries or their previous or alternate religious equivalents were for.

You need to read the memoirs of real people in history writing about the deaths of their children or husband/wife because everything you are saying is in direct contradiction of many many outpourings of grief from those who lived and loved hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Martha Ballard was a midwife too. So she writes about parents grief stricken after losing their babies.

Lots of Roman letters about grief. Seneca wrote
”His mother (Octavia) never ceased to weep and sob during her whole life, never endured to listen to wholesome advice, never even allowed her thoughts to be diverted from her sorrow. She remained during her whole life just as she was during the funeral, with all the strength of her mind intently fixed upon one subject. I do not say that she lacked the courage to shake off her grief, but she refused to be comforted, thought that it would be a second bereavement to lose her tears, and would not have any portrait of her darling son, nor allow any allusion to be made to him. She hated all mothers, and raged against Livia with especial fury, because it seemed as though the brilliant prospect once in store for her own child was now transferred to Livia’s son. Passing all her days in darkened rooms and alone, not conversing even with her brother, she refused to accept the poems which were composed in memory of Marcellus, and all the other honors paid him by literature, and closed her ears against all consolation. She lived buried and hidden from view, neglecting her accustomed duties, and actually angry with the excessive splendor of her brother’s prosperity, in which she shared. Though surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she would not lay aside her mourning garb, though by retaining it she seemed to put a slight upon all her relations, in thinking herself bereaved in spite of their being alive.”

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1. The first pregnancy is usually the most dangerous.
2. You don't calculate cumulative probabilities by adding percentages.

If a woman has a 1% chance of dying in childbirth each pregnancy (she doesn't, but pretend that she does), her chance of being alive after ten pregnancies is given as 0.99^10 = 0.904 and her chance of dying is 9.6%, not 10%. Calculating contraceptive failure rates works the same way.

From this Lancet paper, For every maternal death, an additional 20–30 women develop serious pregnancy-related complications.

Prior to modern medicine, fistula and other complications would have been for life and far more commonplace than maternal mortality.

Thank you for doing the maths. I knew it was wrong but too lazy to do it myself.

Consoling to you maybe to think because many babies died, people didn't mourn them as much as now but not borne out by the many diaries of both mothers and fathers who lost children.

My grandmother, born1868, had 12 pregnancies and lost 2 babies perinatally, 2 as toddlers from scarlet fever . Each death was devastating.

People mention the later age of people getting married. Yes but ( like my grandparents) they may have been cohabiting for years before but couldn't marry because you had to be 21 to marry without parental approval.

Also, you need to be sceptical about the truthfulness of people speaking to officials ( be they conducting a census, a marriage, registering a birth etc etc.

My grandparents married at 21 because they couldn't get parental permission before. But, in fact they lied : they weren't 21 yet and Manchester Cathedral was prepared to just take the money and go ahead.

Similarly none of my aunts', uncles', parents' birth certificates are accurate. Typically their parents waited anything upto 3/6 months before registering the birth. One neighbour's birth certificate was a year out. His parents were immigrants and presumably didn't speak English and didn't know the rules either.

After the death of my great grandmother, my great grandfather progressively became 'younger and younger' on the censuses until his 3 children became his siblings. He then married a much younger woman.

All the women in our family worked before and after marriage. Before the Industrial Revolution they worked as spinners, agricultural workers, in their father's businesses etc. After they worked in the cotton mills of Manchester ( as indeed did their children from a very young age), in funeral parlours, collecting leather from factories, taking in washing etc. There was no option if the family was to eat.

I nearly died in childbirth in the early 2000s. I only avoided death because I was in hospital and had doctors nearby. It is one of the reasons I never had anymore children.

Women in Victorian times were very brave and also powerlessness in many respects.

Its important to understand changes over time & differences between urban & rural. You're talking about the late 19th/early 20th Century. The people we have mentioned who married in their mid-late 20s were in the eraly modern period - things change in the 19th century, primarily because of urbanisation. They would not have been cohabiting unless part of a working household. In small towns & rural communities they were far less likely to lie because everyone locally would know them. You do get people travelling away & lying, e.g bigamous marriages happened, but it wasn't normal.

A slight digression re being unmarried. I think the element of class comes into it.

Looking into our family trees, DH's and mine, there were several babies brought up by grandparents after teen daughter "got into trouble". One mum eventually married her soldier boyfriend, and had already given the child his surname. Her daughter lived with the grandparents while she was a live-in servant. That was 1870s Nova Scotia.

Another ancestor was born in Brick Lane London and appeared on the census in 1841 as living with her grandparents. Her real mother was one of three sisters, all married and left home. Eventually I identified which one by a baptism record. When the ancestor got married she signed with an x, so we assume very poor childhood.

It's interesting to see just how quickly remarriages for both men and women were. It's particularly true of men, as women with children were slightly less desirable unless you were a widower and needed a live in domestic servant to look after your children...

A couple of things relating to unmarried women that isn't mentioned here: firstly is the life of domestic service - if you were in a maid in a household during Victorian times the length of hours often meant it was difficult to actually meet anyone. It's not untypical for women to effectively dedicate themselves to a house and to work for the family for a great many years, near marrying. Of course this was a sort of financial independence but also was a dependence on the family. This wasn't without risk either though - men of the house would often think of the maid as their property and act accordingly. There's an example in DHs family of a direct ancestor having a child out of wedlock. The boy has an unusual name so I dig some digging and found there was a man who ended up having children with two of his maids who would fit with being the father from his name. He also had two wives! So undoubtedly there was five mothers in total. Then there's living in remote rural communities where siblings ran the family together and don't ever have the opportunity to meet someone and never marry - this applied to both men and women. I've found a number of examples of both and it's interesting to see just the level of lack of opportunity and dedication to work.

Interestingly, although having children out of wedlock (or sex before marriage) was frowned upon, unmarried (or widowed) mothers with small children were considered part of the "deserving poor" all the way through the middle ages right up until workhouses became a thing. There was an understanding that, work being what it was, it wasn't possible for a woman to physically support herself and raise small children.

That would depend very much on the circumstances under which a woman found herself heading a household with small children I think. Illegitimacy wasn't just frowned upon it was considered a major threat to society. Sex before marriage wasn't particularly frowned upon if you were having sex with someone you were betrothed to (a lot of brides pre19th century were pregnant). If the man then jilted you the community might be forgiving. Otherwise women with illegitimate children (particularly more than one) would surely have a hard time?. Widows are a whole other thing as its not a womans fault if her husband dies.

I found the Poldark novels, especially the later ones, incredibly interesting regarding the marriages made under so many different circumstances and across different classes.

Especially the story of the lame girl who has her own trade, therefore is "too good" for the village men, but not good enough for anyone else either.