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?

@Socksorter I have just ordered the book you mentioned.

A fascinating thread, OP thank you starting it.

Very little knowledge, but...
I'm 45, married for 20 years, never had kids.
(From another country).
And, needless to say, if I didn't feel at 23 that
I need to get married to gain a bit of dignified life (how naive), then I never would, either.

@RedToothBrush yes, I have come to the conclusion that farming life was more healthy. My grandfathers grandfather lived well into his 90s - not even matched by my mother who lived to be 92.

My maternal Great-Grandmother had 11 healthy pregnancies and normal deliveries in the 1930s and 40s. No miscarriages she was aware of. She said childbirth was 'easy as shelling peas' and lived into her 80s. She was admittedly knackered for a couple of decades but loved pregnancy and babies and said she wanted all of them and would've been happy to have more even though they didn't have a pot to piss in.

My maternal Grandmother had 7 in the 1950s and early 60s, miscarried a twin but the other survived which was a bit of a surprise for her when she found out several weeks later she was still pregnant. She said childbirth was 'just like really bad period pain'. She hated pregnancy and didn't want so many children but had them with 3 different husbands/partners including one from an affair while she was married. She wanted a sex life, not more babies but withdrawal method and charting her cycles didn't work for her. She tried to abort my Uncle by drinking gin in a hot bath which is what an old neighbour told her would work but it didn't. She was glad it didn't in the end as that was her only, very very precious and spoiled boy 😃She died at 60 due to natural causes.

My Mum had two healthy pregnancies and normal deliveries. No miscarriages. She was not happy however, to find out that for her, giving birth was not at all like just bad period pain or shelling peas 😂

A figure in this paper implies the risk was 1 in 20 per birth until antibiotics, when the immediate postnatal period is included https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/

terrifying indeed, as most women took this 1/20 risk multiple times.

It wasn't/isn't just death that's a worry. It would have been the very real risk of permanent damage/life limiting injuries. Even today, those aren't always taken seriously enough (aawww you have a permanently prolapsed uterus. At least the babies here safely that's the main thing etc). I think when the NHS first started they were shocked by how many woman turned up to have quite horrific old birthing injuries treated that they had just been living with up till then.

I think also because maternal mortality rates were higher, the number of women who had lost their own mother through childbirth, or seen close female relatives die as a result when young would have been much higher. That's got to have a strong psychological effect.

She would have known for the next 10 babies though.

Sadly, refusing sex simply wasn’t an option for a lot of women.

My grandmother, born 1914, was one of a huge family and grew up in awful poverty. She witnessed her father ‘forcing himself’ on her mother on many occasions.

I'm like that now, I think it's actually worse now.

They didn't know back then that they were going to tear and shit themselves and their organs would be compressed and all kinds of awful side effects could happen, some permanent. Plus they'd basically be kicked out of society so that probably seemed worse, it was just something women did, like have periods.

I think people go into it quite ignorant today. I knew a lot more about my friends' pregnancies than they did, some of them were quite horrified by the things they didn't find out until after they were pregnant or gave birth. Whereas I made a decision ahead of time that it just wasn't worth it to me.

I also read/heard on a podcast that colostrum was seen as unhealthy and women were encouraged not to feed their babies until the milk came in. Which led to malnourished babies and mothers at risk of mastitis - which, untreated, would often lead to death.

Also, malnourished women whose bones did not form correctly as teenagers were then more likely to have difficulty with birth. So having a baby pre - industrial revolution (where food supply met demand better in villages) and before male doctors got involved was much safer than 1800s/1900s

Witnessing a woman bleed to death after giving birth in 21st Century Britain and being powerless to stop it, despite all the meds, blood, and surgery we could give seriously made me reconsider if I wanted kids or not.
Love kids, hate pregnancy and childbirth.

There's a midwife in America called Ina May Gaskin. She runs a place called The Farm where women go to give birth (with a hospital very close by). From 1974 - 2000 they helped 1,900 women give birth. Zero maternal fatalities and 13 babies died (of which 5 has lethal abnormalities)

I think it's in her book she mentions a Belgian? Dutch? midwife in the 1600s who kept very good records and had very similar stats. Can't remember more (did a PP mention this up thread?)

Once birth became medicalized and male doctors got involved, birth became a lot more dangerous for women. The lack of hygiene was referred to up thread. Also male doctors would have been hurrying the women along and insisting on non-natural positions for the women to lie in eg on their back rather than however they wanted.

This is not to say that modern medicine has not saved the lives of many many women and babies. But I do think it's extremely interesting that when women are given time, space, comfort, compassion and autonomy, births go much better

It wasn't just the fact that women were forced into marriage by economics and society, they were also sold the lie that having children is almost essential to be a 'proper' woman, and that men wanting to marry you, pursuing you and proposing to you is flattering, desirable and romantic. Much of this nonsense persists today.

There's two obvious things that I've not seen mentioned here. (Although I've not read every single post)

Women get horny, and women get broody.

Evolution means that we're genetically wired to want to procreate. People who weren't willing to take that risk didn't pass on their genes.

Women still take risks by getting pregnant, physical, financial etc. Theres god knows how many posts on here weekly from women who know their partner is utter shit, but won't leave because they want kids.

And in earlier centuries we were having kids younger. Teenagers tend to think they're invincible. There's an evolutionary reason for that.

Why would risk of death be any different?

I heard on the radio recently - but can’t remember which Radio 4 programme - that historical mortality rates in childbirth were lower than most people think, and that fiction is responsible for some of the misconceptions, as maternal death in childbirth is a useful plot device.

However my aunt - born in 1920 - resisted all offers of marriage, as she was terrified of childbirth, her own mother having died of a placenta praevia while giving birth to twins. She trained as a nurse, worked all over the world, and died peacefully in her bed at the age of 85.

Women had to marry as, with very small exception, unmarried females, even of high social status, had no rights whatsoever and often could not even inherit. There was a lot of social stigma attached to being unmarried and "spinster" was a comical figure everyone pitied. There were some women who went against it but they were exceptional persons, and mostly lived outside of the "polite society".

With regards to children - even Queen Victoria could not avoid having them, even though she hated being pregnant and giving birth. For the majority of population children were considered a by product of sex. Also, very often the value of female, and f her marriage, was pinned upon her providing a heir, so risking death was considered totally worth it.

@Bigcoatlady Your stats are a bit dodgy. If each pregnancy has 1/100 mortality rate, then that never changes. Even if have 100 pregnancies, each one carries the same amount of risk - the rate itself doesn't change

Traditionally nuns paid a dowry when they entered the convent. The class system was rife in the church. Those without dowries served (kitchen work etc) those with dowries became educated, maybe teachers. Definitely the convent leaders were from the wealthy class (often they were from a powerful family). So a woman didn't have the automony to enter the convent to avoid childbirth and marriage; unless she had the financial support of a father or brother. Maybe she could convince them by feigning a vocation or the family liked the increased respectability of having some of its members in the church.

Probably, but I suppose they learned to live with that fear, as being something outside their control and therefore not to be dwelt on. Nowadays we live with the possibility of dying in a road traffic accident or a nuclear holocaust, but most of us don't think about these things very much.

Some really interesting stuff in this thread, but also a lot of people talking really sweepingly about women's position in the entirety of history. Women have held different legal, philosophical, moral, cultural positions in history in different times and places, and have had different levels of control over their lives depending both on who they were and on where and when they lived. One small example is a PP talking about women getting married at 15 - not in Northern Europe in the Early Modern era, which had a noticeably higher average age of marriage for both men and women, normally late 20s, when compared to Southern Europe. (With the exception of the aristocracy, who obviously did weird child marriages etc. as part of dynastic maneouvring.) Or another PP mentioned women having no legal personhood - not under Early Medieval Irish legal codes, in which men and women held property separately. Or the mention of dowries, which are not a universal social more - lots of cultures do bride price instead. Etc. etc. I could go on because history is fascinatingly weird and people do almost anything you could imagine, somewhere and somewhen.

Also obviously none of this is directly relevant to the OP's question, sorry! But I think it's really important not to flatten history into a Victorian soup.

That's one in 100 (England, 1845) live births. If the average number of live births per woman was five, her (crudely averaged) lifetime risk was one in 20.

yes apparently that's the reason Queen Elizabeth 1 never married or had a child because of her fear of dying in child birth.

f

This was the case after the mediaeval period too.

Veuve Cliquot champagne is named because Madame Cliquot's husband died and she, now Veuve (widow) Cliqout carried on running the vineyard.