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?

Widow and widower remarriage is a topic all of its own.

In my family tree I have a woman widowed in her 30s with a couple of children, who fairly promptly remarried, to the much younger bachelor down the road and had a couple more children with him. There was something like an 8 year age gap.

This thread makes me want to go back to the work I did on my family tree years ago and remind myself about it all.

Yes on the remarriage thing, it's interesting that the fairy tales go on about wicked stepmothers, but these days, if a child is murdered, it's very often by the mum's boyfriend/new husband.

@SharonEllis they undoubtedly had a hard time. But providing for the children/their mother was one of the responsibilities of the parish (obviously everyone was hand to mouth at the time anyway so it would have been enough to feed them not much else). Arguably thats why extramarital affairs were frowned upon.
It was a huge issue if the woman didn't want to say (or who didn't know) who the father was. That is because, if the father was known, it was the responsibility of HIS parish to pay for the children. If the father was unknown it was the responsibility of the parish the children were born in. So obviously the parish the woman was in would be piling on the pressure for her to tell them who the father was before the birth - midwives were actually tasked with interrogating women during labour though some did some didn't. There were also some tales of women mid-labour being rather hastily carted over the parish borders before the child was born.

But actually, if you read old records there's a range of views. Some are much more sympathetic to the mother/child and some aren't. You might have one parish record describing an abandoned child as a "bastard" (technically true) but another describing them as "a child of the people". I think there was more pragmatism and compassion at times than people realise. e.g. I once read a case where a man and woman had a child out of wedlock. Both remarried other people and the baby was brought up by the man and his wife. When he died, the parish wanted to send him to the mother but she argued she couldn't take him because she couldn't afford him alongside her other children. So, although she wasn't a single mother, it was decided to pay out a small weekly sum of money to her per week to help in his upbringing and this would be best for the child and cheaper overall for the parish than potentially having to deal with an abandoned child. There wasn't the castigating of "fallen woman!!!", (although I do feel really bad for the child in that case, but hopefully she did actually want him she just needed to make sure she got the support from the parish).

I think they were probably more afraid of having another child to bring up, it wasn't that common to die in childbirth. The risk was about 1 in 1000 even in 1751.

No it was around ten times that.

One thing that always bothered me about middle class/wealthy men, when they came of age they usually went on the grand tour (or similar) and were encouraged to sow their wild oats (fuck anything that moved) on their travels. Then they were married to a young virgin who were often clueless about sex, some were taken from their convent school to wed. Its horrific to think what they were subjected to. For many of them pregnancy and childbirth probably gave them a bit of respite from being raped.

@RedToothBrush I read a very interesting article about the invention of the bicycle as an unintented tool for social mobility in that it allowed people to travel beyond their immediate vicinity and meet a much wider range of potential spouses.

@Deadringer I often think of poor women getting cystitis the first few times they had sex. That would put you right off it for life.

Comments keep coming up about convents which arent applicable to England! Convents went out with the disestablishment of the monasteries. The few (rich) catholic families left after the Reformation often sent their daughters aboroad to be educated or women went to European convents. There are not a lot of nuns around until convents started to come back after one of the catholic emancipation measures (can't remember which) in the 19th C and even then there was hardly an explosion of them.

So obviously the parish the woman was in would be piling on the pressure for her to tell them who the father was before the birth - midwives were actually tasked with interrogating women during labour though some did some didn't.
Ah, the bastardy bond!
There were bank forms available along the lines of:
I, ....[name]... did on the .... day of the .... month of year of our Lord..... question in childbed ....[name] as to the paternity of the BASTARD child ...[name]....delivered by her in the parish of ...[name]... that day and she the aforesaid ....name..., mother of the said BASTARD child, did attest that ....[name]... of the parish of ...[name].. was the FATHER of the said BASTARD child and would be liable for the maintenance of the said BASTARD child at the sum of ...s...d per week....

I've got a copy of one somewhere, filled in, with the 'bastard' in bigger bolder type than aImost anything else. It was an attempt to get the father to cough up for the child, ideally by marrying the mother.

IIRC, in the one I have copied, the woman was a widow and ended up marrying the father of 'the said BASTARD child'. It was a brutal system, but it did at least try to make some men liable for their children. Because otherwise the whole parish was paying a share, and the respectable didn't see why they should be shelling out for activities of Shagger John from the next village.

I think the figure also includes the postnatal period so includes deaths from infections and injuries, which must have been a lot.

Also the table is the rate per 1000 LIVE births, perhaps mothers aren't counted where they both died 😳

Historically, it's true that childbirth was a significant risk for women, with high mortality rates and complications. Many women feared pregnancy and childbirth, but the societal pressures and expectations were immense. Women were expected to marry and bear children, and there were often very few viable alternatives for them.

The pressure to provide heirs, especially sons, was intense, and refusing marriage or sex could result in social ostracism, economic hardship, or even worse. While period dramas might show women embracing these roles, the reality was often far more complex and fraught with fear and resignation.

Women did use various methods to avoid pregnancy, though many were unreliable and not widely known or accessible. Herbal remedies, prolonged breastfeeding, and other traditional practices were sometimes employed, but these were not always effective.

As mentioned by other posters, there are also historical records of women expressing their fears and anxieties about childbirth. Diaries, letters, and literature from various periods reveal that many women were acutely aware of the dangers they faced. However, these fears had to be balanced with the societal expectations and personal desires for family and children.

In some cases, women might have tried to make themselves less attractive or avoid marriage, but this would have been challenging and carried its own risks and consequences. The societal framework was such that most women had little choice but to follow the expected path.

So, overall, while many women were likely petrified of the dangers of childbirth, the pressures and lack of alternatives meant they had to face those fears within the confines of their societal roles.

But many women's desire for children & motherhood was genuine, it wasn't just societal pressure. And just because yoi're scared of pregnancy & birth doesn't mean you don't want it.

I am reading a book about women in medieval times, and it said that Alfred the Great's daughter only had one child and refused to have sex again afterwards because it was unseemly of the daughter of a king to go through childbirth! She was apparently a powerful ruler in her own right.

I wonder how many died of kidney infections from untreated cystitis? There were no antibiotics back then.