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?

I was taught that Elizabeth 1 didn’t marry because of the risk to her sovereign powers.

She also needed to retain her autonomy and authority as queen regnant for her own safety. A husband, any husband, would have been supported by the nobles to become king coregent, the way that William of Orange became king when he married queen regnant Mary, and it would only take an unfortunate "accident" or "illness" for Liz to die and her "D"H to become sole monarch.

It says 5 per 1000 in Table 1 - so one in 200. Which doesn't agree with Figure 1 (unless I'm misreading it). The article also says that puerperal pyrexia was a major killer of mothers in childbed, but the rate cited there is about 2 per thousand, which ties in better with Table 1.

I only have anecdata to offer, but there is no evidence in my own ancestry (going back between 3 and about 10 generations) of any woman dying in childbirth. I did think that one probably had, as she'd had 3 or 4 babies at 2 year intervals, and died two years after the last, but I got her death certificate and she died of TB.

I think about this a lot. Given the pain and misery brought by childbearing until fairly recently in history, I question if most men in the past were uncaring bastards to put their wives through it.

I'd rather not have sex at all than live in deprivation with six kids and no proper access to medicine, fresh food etc. Yet the women did it, knowing that each new child was a further drain on their meagre resources.

Does anyone know anything about pre-history, and likely family sizes etc? I've wondered about it a lot recently, but have only heard snippets. Is there any evidence for family sizes?

I love the bits in I, Claudius when he describes how unpopular marriage and childbirth is for noblewomen, because you could die, would be inconvenienced during pregnancy, and your husband might sod off with a lover - so much so that the emperor had to incentivise it.

@MorrisZapp Ir makes you wonder about men’s attitudes, doesn’t it. One of my great-grandma’s had a heart condition and her doctor said that she shouldn’t have any more children after her second. But she had six and died after the youngest was born.

I’m guessing that her husband insisted on regular sex and didn’t use condoms, which were available then. I can’t imagine how frightening it must’ve been discovering that you’re pregnant again and knowing that it might kill you.

Yes I often wonder this too!

If you loved your wife then surely you’d be petrified at her being pregnant. Surely you’d be more happy with just foreplay instead of actual sex or using condoms because the thought of her dying would be unbearable!

Of course they were uncaring bastards. They regarded women as property: a uterus to be exploited for heirs, a skivvy, and a cunt to fuck. Many of them still do: the Relationships board is testament to this.

I don't think death was as unbearable then.

Children and women of childbearing age don't die all that much these days. In addition to losing someone you love, there's a shock factor there, and a sense that this is wrong, that it shouldn't have happened.

Go back 500 years, and that shock factor doesn't exist. When youre having 8 kids because you know 4 of them won't live to the age of 5, you're less upset when one dies. Same with your partner, you know loads of your mates who's wives have died, so it's less of a shock when yours does. Add to that no contraception, and you've probably only known your wife a year before she's having your children. It's going to be less upsetting than losing someone you've spent your entire life with.

And if you're the woman doing the dying, then there's heaven to look forward to. You're likely to really really believe in some variant of heaven, and it's probably a lot more appealing when you're a peasant living in a hut in a muddy field, with barely enough food.

We're living through a really weird bit of human history. Scientific medicine has only really existed for the last few hundred out of tens of thousands of years, and life stopped being cheap maybe 150 years ago.

From our exceedingly privileged position, it's really hard to imagine how anyone from more than a few hundred years ago felt about literally anything, attitudes around death most of all.

No l don’t agree with this at all.

Im sure there’s evidence that people were devastated by their children’s death.

I think it was more common, but no less bearable. Why should be people be less caring or hurt because they were ‘used to it’

You know it sounds quite like my parents.
My mum managed to keep her job as a teacher - money was an issue when I was little - and being a teacher meant she was at home to put dinner on the table etc….
she had (and still has) the same deep disappointment that she wasn't allowed to carry in studying.

It's a callous thing to say, but grief is a luxury.

For most of human history, we didn't have time to be devastated by the death of our loved ones. There was no bereavement leave, your kid dies and you still have to go to work the next day, other wise you get the sack and the rest of your children starve.

Even today, there are parts of the world where this is true.

And just not having kids isn't an option either. There's no pensions, no state benefits, most people's savings throughout history have amounted to "enough food to last the winter". Your kids are your pension. Should you actually be lucky enough to get to an age where you can't work, then you better hope you have some kids around and that they like you enough to support you.

The past isn't just a different country, it may as well be a different planet.

Yes it is. If you watch the documentary in the link, all the clues are there. Funny how it took a woman to actually figure it out...

From our exceedingly privileged position, it's really hard to imagine how anyone from more than a few hundred years ago felt about literally anything, attitudes around death most of all.

I wonder how it compares with women living in rural Africa. I've spent quite a bit of time there for work and one thing that's definitely different is the belief in the supernatural. Often people will consider a death, especially of a child, either god's will or a curse. I have a friend in Tanzania who nearly died during her first birth and was told she was at very high risk if she got pregnant again. She got pregnant again (on purpose) as she believed if she prayed to god every day she'd be ok (she was, thankfully).

I think it's also important to remember that if you have a hard, joyless existence then children can often be the only little light in that existence. When I've told women I've met in rural Tanzania that I've chosen not to have children they typically feel sorry for me.

@EdithStourton
Having TB in pregnancy increases the risk of maternal death.
My paternal GGM died in 1888 age 28. I thought that she had died having her 4th child and her baby died too.
However, I now have her death certificate and she died of TB in her 8th month of pregnancy. I don't have the death certificate for the baby but his birth and death was registered in the same quarter so I imagine he was stillborn.

@asbestosmouth24 I just saw a documentary suggesting the real reason for EIR's 'Virgin Queen' status was related to her uncertain sexuality. There is apparently some debate as to whether or not she was definitively female. Or maybe the Patriarchy is taking control of the historical narrative?

People were much more superstitious. I always wondered, when you get to the 18th centuries when superstitions started to be dismissed as "old wives tale" whether the philosophical types who mused on the irrationality of women/common folk considered their own privileged position. Because miners, sailors, fishermen etc were still really superstitious (and actually many are today), so were women - especially around childbirth, children etc (or if they were wives of miners, fishermen etc about their husbands safety). Because those groups had to deal psychologically with the terrifying reality that horrible death/injury could come at any time, and that they did not have much control in their lives. Everyone was superstitious in the middle ages. By the enlightenment you had people with relative control over their lives who could afford to be rational. But only men. And really only adult men from a certain class. But none of them seem to have thought maybe that's why they were so much more "rational" than everyone else.

But I think the existence of numerous folk tales around keeping children safe, keeping pregnancies safe, childbirth etc shows people were bothered by it - they were coping in the best way they knew how.

She was stripped naked as a child in front of a foreign emissary to prove that she was "normal", I think we can therefore assume she was. Besides, given how desperate they were for a male heir at the time, I would have thought any ambiguity would have been interpreted the other way. No-one would have said "its a boy but lets pretend its a girl so we can get a female monarch on the throne."

I've also read that until about 100 years ago men expected to lose at least one wife in childbirth. That rang the changes in women for them very nicely, and that's why so many have trouble being faithful today! No idea if that's true but maybe!

Well err yes but if you keep repeating independent events your chance of any outcome increases. You are right I oversimplified the actual figure is the .99 chance of not dying x 10 subtracted from 1 which I think comes to a 9.6% chance of dying after ten births.

If you don't trust the maths think how many times you would be willing to play Russian roulette with the barrel spun between each round.

Obviously that's all nonsense as births are never independent events and maternal mortality was probably high during times of scarcity or when infection was high, and of course women who were physiologically at risk of complications due to pelvic size or whatever likely died during their first pregnancy. So actually if you made it through pregnancy one your chances of doing well subsequently increased a lot.

I’m not sure, but I know I would have died during my labour. The experience definitely influenced my decision not to have more though.

I have to recommend an excellent book. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Great read, very engaging. Just thinking about it, I want to re-read it. It’s full of awesome commentary, lots of actual statistics and personal stories, well put together. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

try reading this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306987785901343
Not saying the hypothesis is true, but certainly gives food for thought!

I would have died, and it would have been slow and agonising. It's a very sobering thought.

As to Elizabeth 1st - if you were a very powerful woman, you're in a position to finally decide if you want kids, and I can't see any reason to think it was anything but that.

Just look at modern times - given the choice, women control their fertility.

My grandmother born in 1914 was a doctor, some women were educated at University in the '30's.