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?

Yep, Question No. 1 asked of a woman on an African bus is usually, 'Do you have any children?'
'Are you married?' is some way down the list.
IME anyway.

Edited to add:
@Bobbotgegrinch
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.
I'm not sure that is true. Going back to Africa again, in at least some African cultures, there are names that are given to babies born after the parents have lost a child which translate as things like 'consolation'.
And referring back to the book about the midwife Martha Ballard that I mentioned waaaay back up the thread, in her diary she quite regularly recorded the anniversaries of the deaths of several of her children. She lost several in the space of a couple of weeks during an epidemic and there are various entries along the lines of, 'This day is the date of the death of my daughter Grace, she was 8yrs 2mths and 5d. old.'
I do think though that the experience of losing a child was less isolating than it is now. You were surrounded by other people who knew what you were going through, because they'd been through it themselves. They might have handled it differently, but it's fair to expect that there would have been a greater degree of understanding.

Cambridge didn’t award degrees to women until 1948! The University of London did in 1878. It wasn’t easy to study at university as a woman, though.

Having worked in multiple African countries in areas of high poverty and low resource, I can confirm that not only is pregnancy and birth highly risky and causes stress and anxiety to women, but the first years of a child life is also fraught with (preventable) danger.

the idea that a woman would have the agency to either refuse sex or access contraception in all cases is sadly not true for many locations in the world.

you only have to look to the US for terrifying experiences of pregnant women unable to access safe sexual health service - because of the horrific mostly male view that women are put on this earth to procreate

I remember studying this. Deaths in childbirth itself, deaths from repeated pregnancy and childbirth, deaths from post-childbirth infections, deaths from conditions during pregnancy, deaths from miscarriages, deaths from attempted abortions. The amount of women who died from pregnancy was huge.

Cultures were set up to coerce women into sex and marriage. Unmarried women were figures of derision, suspicion and hatred; women were excluded from the kind of education and work which would allow them to be financially independent from husbands or male relatives; men made society threatening and violent to women who had no male protector; unchaperoned women were often excluded from society; women were seen as chattel to be traded by male relatives for family connections.

What I find interesting in all this is the psychology of men. Imagine if every time you had sex with someone there was a pretty decent risk that sometime in the next nine months or so your action will have killed them. How many of us would still do it? How many of us could do it to someone we claimed we loved? When I read novels from the past or read about historical relationships I always bear in mind that the women were entering on a path that could very well kill them.

Prostitution was invented so men could have sex with women whose deaths from pregnancy wouldn't materially or emotionally affect them.

I'm going to post a really good article on this, written by an American woman who used to post on Mumsnet a few years ago.

I think it's a bit simplistic to describe a) women as entirely subjugated and b) peasants as entirely miserable.

I'm picking facts at random here (because it's ten minutes to bedtime...), but for example:

• a medieval lady of the manor probably spoke multiple languages, was responsible for managing a household budget, and would the the equivalent of a manager of a multi-million pound estate.
• one in three days was a Sts Day holiday.
• physical labour was accompanied by an organic diet, plus a high number of tasks and jobs were craft-based - all good for mental health.

There are many accounts of tender and loving relationships - for example, Richard III openly weeping at his wife's funeral.

I'm cherry picking here because I don't have time, but I disagree with the narrative that history is a straight path from primitive to modern. And a lot of the commentary is (naturally) Eurocentric.

Being a nun was not a common life choice after the Reformation (there were not a lot of convents to go into) & it was not necessarily a life women chose, or only after they had no other options.

It's very easy to misread numbers.

I've finally had some time to play with the map - I've been out all day. I've linked it for anyone who wants to find it easily.

If you hover your cursor over a country, it gives you the stats for that year. For the UK in 1842, maternal mortality was 597/100,000 births, so 0.6% more-or-less (and that was probably nearer the mark once you take into account deaths resulting from miscarriages or complications of pregnancy).

At that time in English history, women had on average somewhere between 6 and 7 births (see other link). That average will include the minority of women who never had any children, so for those who did have children, it was probably about 7. So you had about a 4.2% chance of dying in childbirth in early Victorian England; by the late Victorian era, family size had fallen and so had maternal mortality (the former moreso than the latter).

Obviously those numbers were different for women living in poverty in the slums, who would have had a higher risk due to pre-existing illnesses, poor nutrition and insanitary conditions, and lower for well-nourished women in Heather environments (such as farmers' wives, or the wives of small tradesmen in little rural towns). Not sure how it was for the middle class if they chose to deliver in hospital, given the state of medical knowledge and the way that doctors didn't bother washing their hands properly....

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality?time=1842&region=Europe

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3865739/

Your history seems to be a patchy. At what period in history and in what class are you suggesting women were 'married off' at a young age? In the early modern period both men & women (outside the aristocracy) married in their mid to late 20s when they could afford to leave home & support themselves. Far from being 'married off' they had a considerable say in who they married and there's plenty of evidence that many marriages were very happy or at least 'companiable'. There are a lot of stereotypes & things that are plain wrong being bandied about. Ages of marriage & numbers of children actually change quite a bit over time, as do deas about a good marriage. Despite the terrible lives some women lived with dictatorial husbands & the double standards at play not all women were subjects of their husbands in the home, even if they were at law.

Depends when you're talking about but in the 16th-18th C women tended not to have babies in their teens. They got married in their mid-late 20s.

Good grief, this idea has been thoroughly, completely and utterly debunked by historians over the last 50 plus years. Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brithers sisters, were just as distressed as us when they lost someone they loved. Have you never read a memorial or gravestone? They were often distraught at at their losses. There are tons of letters, diaries, plays (Shakespeare anyone??) novels, works of art etc etc that show that this is just not true.

Probably. But they'd also have been less frightened of death in general than we are. More likely to view it as an every day occurrence and more likely to believe in an afterlife and being reunited with the many people they'd known who were already dead.

There still a lot of people who believe in the afterlife. As far as I can tell, they don't seem to be any less devastated by the death of loved ones than the non religious.

For those who wonder if a child was mourned less because child mortality rates were higher can I recommend you read: 'Hamnet' by Maggie Farrell?
It's fiction but worth reading I think.

Good call. Yes, its fiction but written by someone who knows her Shakespeare & has done some historical research. The idea that people feared death less & mourned loved ones less doesn't stand up to 5 minutes scrutiny if you spend time with the records of earlier times.

What?
I'm not talking cave-people. The history of women.
Women of lower classes often had little or no education, had to work to support.family and married young because their life expectancy was crap.
Yo cseem to be only considering recent history. Upper class women were married for mobney, dynasties,vetc and generally had very little say in it.

I'd also like to suggest the 14th century poem "pearl", which is about a father trying to cope with the death of his daughter.

Can you tell us what your evidence is? What period are you talking about? Once you'd passed the danger periods of childhood & childbirth or going to war if you were a man, life expectancy was pretty high.

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Depends what you mean by recent. I'm talking about the 16-18th century. Outside the aristocracy women did not marry particularly young.

Surely only those in particular times/ places would have been ignorant about sex, giving birth, etc? No one's going to have grown up in the country around livestock and not known the basics, I'd assume. So that's pretty much everyone living before extensive urbanisation. With the possible exception of some very rich people who wouldn't have got their hands dirty.

I think ignorance of the "facts of life" is mostly a Victorian and early 20th century thing to be honest. I'm not sure how much it can be applied to the rest of history.

My comment was about the fear of women facing childbirth, as per the OPs question, I didn't give an opinion on how distressed the bereaved may have been. I understand that deeply religious people facing their own death find the thought of an afterlife a comfort and that it allays some of their fears as they tend to believe its not the end, there's a better place, they will see their loved ones again.

Well I'm not posting as an expert, just another MN poster offering an opinion, so I've not compiled a dossier of evidence. The period I had in mind (based on the references in the OP to 'historical' and 'period drama') would be any time pre 20th century. When life expectancy was around 40 something and infant mortality very high. My own grandmother, born at the turn of the century, lost two of her 5 children in infancy and died herself in her 40s. Her husband died mid 50s.

Fair enough, although it didn't seem to help much with my religious loved ones as they were dying.

But also, don't forget that belief in the afterlife was accompanied by a belief in purgatory and hell! I think that would have been pretty scary to face.

It helped my mum tremendously. Right up to the end she said she was frightened only of dying itself because there might be pain, but not of death, as she knew there were people 'waiting for her'. Mum didn't believe in purgatory, she was a methodist!