Has birthing gotten longer and harder over the decades?

[emonslemons]

Do you have any stories of mothers, aunties, grandmothers and how their births went.......I don't know how true it is but many of the women I have spoken to from the last generation say they had much quicker and easier births!
This has always fascinated me! And I wonder why their experiences seem so different......admittedly most women I talk to have been middle eastern although my own mother had a much quicker first birth than me and she's English.

I also have a book called something like - Maternity - letters from working women which was about women giving birth in very poor bits of London in the 1900s

This is the book you mean

www.amazon.co.uk/Maternity-Letters-Working-Collected-Co-operative/dp/0860680282/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407479924&sr=1-2&keywords=maternity+letters

The letters are from working class women (some very poor, some not so) throughout England written in response to an a appeal from the Women's Cooperative Guild in 1914, so most of their experiences are from the late 19th century to very early 20th. It's not just about birth but also ailments that can affect women during pregnancy and they certainly did in the days before anti-natal care. Very interesting and definitely an antidote to viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles.

My grandmother had 15 children.
All but the last one survived.
Ive had 2- both very quick straight forward births
I guess if I had 15 I would be popping them out like peas
There's only so much those pelvic floor muscles can take.

Birth wasn't good in Victorian times because of industrialisation/urbanisati

Urbanisation which brought with it diseases. People then overall were much unhealthiest than previous centuries.

I've done my family tree quite far back and there are no child/maternal deaths except one from whooping cough and one who fell off a swing.

All the women tended to have 5 DCs quite spread out.

This makes sense in the pre formula days when babies were breastfed for 4 years which acted as a contraceptive and spread out births.

Families of 10 only came about after bottle feeding and early weaning were brought in.

In the past most first time mums (almost always the hardest birth) were still teenagers whose bodies are better equipped for childbirth. I think the ideal biological age is 19. I also read that as people were less mobile before cars and trains they 'mated' with men from their local area who would have tended to be from the same 'stock'. Ie there was less hip/height incompatibility. Eg Short women married short men and had short babies.

Also before the medical profession invaded childbirth babies were delivered by midwives 'wise women' who were highly skilled in dealing with problem births.
TRIGGER WARNING
The aim was for the woman to survive. The baby was a bonus. I've seen the instruments they used to remove foetuses during difficult births if the mother was at risk. This is very different from now where it's the woman who is butchered because a perfect baby is the desired outcome.

Also with these midwife led home births there was no cross contamination of disease between patients so the infection rate was low. When women started going to hospital to deliver and doctors didn't know about cross contamination of bacteria they used to go between patients without washing their hands. They were literally killing their patients. Post parting infection was the number one cause of maternal mortality.

I also think that because we don't see childbirth growing up, like they used to it is shrouded in mystery until we have our own. This fear of the unknown makes women anxious at a time when relaxation will make the natural process easier.

So many modern customs of birth are setting women up to fail which is causing so much more maternal morbidity than need be. Eg inductions routinely carried out at 40+10. It is normal and healthy for pregnancy to last 37-42 weeks. Women aren't allowed to move about or eat or drink during labour (not everywhere).

Another cause I've read of difficult positioning of the foetus is modern chairs which encourage slouching. I read that we'd have easier births if we spent the last weeks on all fours like our ancestors did.

Cecily, that's the book. I have not read it I think for over 10 years. I might get it out and read it. It was so good, so accurate as it was women of that time writing about things which normally women that low down the social scale did not get a chance to do or at least not have it published.

I think there is a huge difference between birth in slums and birth 200 years before that on farms. I noticed my family graveyard in the country with deaths in the 1800s had long livers, all 70+ years. However the next generation with 10 children living in urban areas industrialised and probably often not very well fed or housed and in a sense living less naturally, not on the land, not out side, lived shorter worse lives (although I am sure even in the country plenty when you owned your own farm or bit of the rainforest or whatever there were still plenty of deaths in childbirth).

Families of 10 only came about after bottle feeding and early weaning were brought in.

Not so. I've also done a lot of research into family/woman's history.
Industrial Victorian Britain was the worst.

But before then there were huge families, there was high infant and maternal death and many women were terrified of giving birth.
It was by no means a golden era before that: that's a pastoral fantasy.

weatherall and it's often hard to get a general understanding from your own family. I've got my Irish/English side back quite a way - it wasn't 5 kids per mum and a sad accident involving a toy at all in mine. Doesn't mean it was that way for everyone: but the whole 'loads of kids, high death rate' was there in both rural England and Ireland. No industry or bottles required.
In India- where some of my family are from, the medical details are harder to come by (also causes of infant death such as malaria naturally higher) past the last 100 years.

...it's also an utter myth that everyone was short and people married 'similar' people in terms of build. And that everyone went on all 4s. Kind of a 'worship of the past' woman's fantasy of the 70s and 80s.
Corsets and giving men more protein routinely etc' meant many women had bodies that were far from ideal (this was particularly so in Tudor times when corsets were worn from infanthood).

In terms of whether the focus was on saving the mother of child: the father was often asked. Asked outright who was priority!

As people have cited, the deaths of both mothers and babies is frequently mentioned in texts as far back as Ancient Greece as something terrifying and commonplace. Perhaps that's why you don't hear about birth injuries: death was so much nearer. You do hear a lot about elderly women "stinking" which would link in with the idea birth injury was standard.

It is not a Victorian invention. Not for the poor and ironically not for the very rich (imagine carrying an heir and knowing your husband had instructed to save the child: even the most caring woman whilst glad of that would be utterly terrified).

Ie there was less hip/height incompatibility. Eg Short women married short men and had short babies.

Except there has been research done on this, and has shown that there is no relationship between difference in size of partners and the size of babies as it is dictated by the mothers genes. There is no evolutionary benefit to the father for his genes to influence the size of the baby - there is no point in mother and baby dying in childbirth after all.

Aghast at the idea that birth was somehow uncomplicated in our grandmothers day and before! Women (and babies) died in childbirth at alarming rates...and guess what? It STILL happens in parts of the world without the proper medical assistance and resources. I don't think women giving birth in Yemen or Congo or any other number of countries where maternal care is poor NOW in the 21st century would be romanticizing birth, quite frankly.

My mum had a long, difficult first birth with me (70s).

Her mother had a traumatic and difficult first birth in the 40s

My other grandmother had 12 children (surviving) in rural Ireland in the 40s and 50s, a stillbirth after a long and traumatic labour and a child that died shortly after birth due to birth injuries (probably a combination of bad shoulder dystocia and lack of oxygen in modern terms). Who knows what modern medicine and midwife care might have been able to prevent?

I am convinced either me or my babies would have died if I wasn't born in the time and place I was. Emergency sections for both, obstetric cholestasis with the second baby that meant my liver started failing at 37 weeks and DD was in distress and had to come out immediately.

Both my mother and I were geared up for a natural birth, too. Mum was quite progressive and chose a maternity hospital that championed active birth back in the 70s. I did hypnobirthing and yoga and had booked a water birth for my first. Booked! Our babies and bodies often have other plans.

DH's grandmother told me very matter of factly that 'we didnlt have complications in those days' which I suppose is true, you either were fine, or not and if you were not it was not complicated, you just died

Frankly I pop them out like peas, and have had four live births starting at the biologically desirable age of 19, but I have to say my pelvic floor was getting like a third leg after the last one, and eventually needed surgery. I don't know how people do 10+ vaginal deliveries without completely wrecking themselves. Oy maybe they did, but just didn't talk to anyone about it.

I've stood at the spot where that happened, at Claremont. It's a small room in palace/stately home terms, quite a nice, well-lit room where you would be happy to give birth, but the tragedy kept staring me in the face.

Incidentally I stood where James VI was born in Edinburgh Castle and that was a teeny tiny side room, and I have no idea where the midwife would have stood.

More children than not died before the age of 5 or at birth in the past unfortunately which is why life expectancies can look short. If instead you strip out those those did not survive beyond 5 years old people lived longer. Which just shows evolution did not get things too right in some respects. I wonder if mortality from childbirth is the same in the wilds for chimps and gorillas and even lions. Does anyone know?

I don't know how people do 10+ vaginal deliveries without completely wrecking themselves. Oy maybe they did, but just didn't talk to anyone about it.
Yep as I mentioned the trope of an older woman stinking of pee is everywhere in literature up till the mid 20th century. Everywhere, in many cultures. I think it was just viewed as 'what happens'.

Greengrow That isn't the full story at all. There was a high infant mortality and a significant number of the poor (and rich- who often made very unwise lifestyle choices) tended to die in their late 30s-50s. If you ran that gauntlet there was a chance you'd live to a ripe old age.
But again the idea baby deaths were the only thing bringing down the average age is a pastoral fantasy (sold in the 70s-80s to promote certain movements under the guise of revisionist history, but not truly so). Parish records don't bear it out and grass roots testimony doesn't bear it out.

'The past' is not one time with similar circumstances.

Infant and maternal mortality did go up with urbanisation and medicalisation of childbirth.

My great grandfather's grandmother in rural Scotland in the early 1800s had 5 children spaced out from when she was 16 to early 40s. They all lived and she lived to her mid sixties. This is a typical pattern I've found researching my family. But maybe this wasn't typical.

My childbirths were easy and didn't require any medical intervention. Maybe it's in the genes.

weatherall Fri 08-Aug-14 09:15:54
I've done my family tree quite far back and there are no child/maternal deaths except one from whooping cough and one who fell off a swing.

I've done a lot of family history. I don't think its easy to spot stillborn babies. Often they were simply not recorded. Or they were listed with no name.

In my family we have a written record that has been passed down through the family which details all the children born in one family - including those who died at birth - these children do not appear in the official records anywhere.

Today they would be.

My lot averaged around 5 births up to about the early to mid 19th century, then between 6 and 10 births during the 19th century, then it came down to 3-4 in the 20th century until the 1970s, when it fell a little bit more to 2-3. I don't actually understand why the birth rate went up in Victorian times.

Weatherall with all due respect can you not see those who are challenging some of the things you are stating have clearly done their own research and are not making errors like 'the past' being one place/time? Indeed many of us have specified.
You seem to focus very much on your family and poor urban areas contrasted with what appear to be better off rural areas: an unfair comparison. Pre-urbanisation not every village was as lucky, and cities still existed (with squalid parts). Class, race and empire meant not everyone had the same situation.
As I mentioned before, in urban areas the situation got worse during the peak of the industrial era - however before then, it was not safe/better/idyllic by any means. This is a myth which has been sold to us well meaningly by many opposed to over medicalised/commercialised lifestyles: but it is^ a myth). And that's even with settled, moderately sufficient rural communities: the famine-struck, the proto-serf, the itinerant, the slave... all these women bore children too.

To suggest - based on what sounds like a very lucky (or selectively recorded... I've found clashing records in my family history, one version kinder than the other) it was all hunky dory pre-Victorian times (and that bottle feeding made large families happen) is rather simplistic IMO.
In Catholic communities for example, you kept going till you died or hit the menopause. No ups or downs over the years bar for medical reasons.

Red - In many/most communities, it was up to whoever kept records as to what was a stillbirth and what was a miscarriage. Hence records are incredibly unreliable (as with many taboo deaths such as those from suicide, domestic abuse or STIs). People didn't write them down. Perhaps they felt a miscarriage was less devastating - perhaps they couldn't afford a Christian burial. Various reasons.

Boffin - In Victorian times there was also a cultural return to the idea of the woman as 'mother' and attempt to keep her in the home, with motherhood as a duty. Queen Victoria made it a policy to encourage large families including propaganda shots of hers! She hated pregnancy and childbirth and wasn't actually as natural a parent as Prince Albert, but felt encouraging the falling birth rate to rise again was something important for the empire.

Weather 5 children spaced evenly and neatly over 24 years? Now, without contraception and without the education to use NFP which is confusing even now with apps etc' (!), to put it crudely, many couples (or sadly, in the days of marital rape many husbands) would not have had the self control to have those few children.
Breastfeeding is only a reliable contraception when the child is an infant feeding every 2-3 hours round the clock.

Of course if birth injuries made intercourse less comfortable for longer (and I have read papers suggesting this as a factor we no longer think about) it might be a factor.
Or just massive amounts of self control.

But many families grew and grew because of biology.

(and that bottle feeding made large families happen)

Bottle feeding actually killed a lot of babies, as they didn't understand the need for sterilisation and the 'milk' they gave children was completely deficient in any nutrition whatsoever.

Red - In many/most communities, it was up to whoever kept records as to what was a stillbirth and what was a miscarriage. Hence records are incredibly unreliable (as with many taboo deaths such as those from suicide, domestic abuse or STIs). People didn't write them down. Perhaps they felt a miscarriage was less devastating - perhaps they couldn't afford a Christian burial. Various reasons.

I agree completely. One of the examples in my family is interesting though, in that it is a twin of a child who did live to adulthood in a pretty affluent / religious family. It was clearly important enough to the family for them to pass the information down through the family, despite the fact the little boy wasn't named.

I think it is a reflection that there is no such thing as 'only' losing one baby. I think our mentality that it was a 'lesser' thing in the past is utter nonsense. It clearly had a devastating effect.