[ExI] Subject: Re: Human extinction

[Jonathan El-Bizri]

I have understood that, throughout the course of human existence, childbirth
has been a pretty dangerous thing. It is hard to consider the trepidation
surrounding it today as being a modern conception, nor the difficulties
being chiefly of socio-psychological origin. Nor do concerns seem any
greater today than they would have been in the past, when medicinal science
was (even) less understood, and everything more dangerous:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/childbirth.cfm

"Childbirth in colonial America was a difficult and sometimes dangerous
experience for women. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of all births ended in the mother's death
as a result of exhaustion, dehydration, infection, hemorrhage, or
convulsions. Since the typical mother gave birth to between five and eight
children, her lifetime chances of dying in childbirth ran as high as 1 in 8.
This meant that if a woman had eight female friends, it was likely that one
might die in childbirth.

Death in childbirth was sufficiently common that many colonial women
regarded pregnancy with dread. In their letters, women often referred to
childbirth as "the Dreaded apperation," "the greatest of earthly miserys,"
or "that evel hour I loock forward to with dread." Many, like New England
poet Anne Bradstreet, approached childbirth with a fear of impending death.
In a poem entitled "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," Bradstreet
wrote,

How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend."



Jonathan El-Bizri

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:34 AM, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>
> Amara asked:
> ...
> > Don't you think that it would be weird if humans evolved to
> > where we are today if every baby's birth was excruciatingly
> > painful?... Amara
>
> Well, in the textbooks I've read, there are two viewpoints on this:
> The evolutionary viewpoint shows how most species of apes and monkeys have
> hips much wider than a baby's heads, and so do not have painful childbirth.
> The exceptions are macaques (close match in one dimension, slightly painful
> labour) and humans (complete mismatch, baby has to rotate as it comes out,
> painful labour). The narrowing of human hips makes for better running speed
> when walking upright. Somewhere, the compromise between improving an
> individual female's mobility with her ability to push babies out became a
> very tight one.
>
> Another viewpoint on painful childbirth is provided by psychology
> textbooks. When dealing with the subject of pain perception, there's usually
> a mention of "couvade" -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couvade
> There are also mentions of differing cultural traditions towards childbirth
> affecting the mother's experience of pain. Given how the human mind can
> modulate pain, it would be surprising if people didn't find ways to minimise
> the pain of childbirth. From this viewpoint, birth doesn't need to be
> excruciatingly painful, but a mother's expectations of childbirth can
> influence the pain she feels.
>
> Tom
>
> Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080822/305c910f/attachment.html>