[ExI] Subject: Re: Human extinction

[Amara Graps]

Jonathan El-Bizri srndpty at gmail.com :
>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 that narrow-in-space-and-time, young country, 6%-of-the-world's
population, strongly religious, puritanical, kind of way, probably that's
true.

If you step out of your narrow perspective, and even out of cultures
that were influenced by (say Catholic religion), is the same true? I
suggest to question your assumptions. Watch some births, live if
possible, and out of hospitals, if possible. If not possible live, then
documentaries and You Tube (skewed, but gives a trace) can still give
demonstrations of birthings that are out of what today's society would
think is 'normal'. Try to consider that what exists in the US today/its
young history is not normal, instead is _abnormal_? How is it that women
in the so-called less-developed cultures (Africa, say), give so little
effort to birthing their babies?

If you insist on quoting literature, then I suggest to go back much
further in time, a couple of thousand of years, and see if the Greeks or
other (say, nature-oriented) cultures write about women suffering in
giving birth. Neither Hippocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Soranus nor other
supposedly learned men of the Grecian School of Medicine wrote of pain
in their notes on normal, uncomplicated birth, for example.

Amara