[ExI] Subject: Re: Human extinction

[samantha]

Amara Graps wrote:
>
> 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.
Pre birth control it was much more universally true.  Large families 
were not just the norm for cultural reasons.  That was very difficult on 
women.   It has a lot more to do with biology and human sexuality than 
religion.
>
> 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. 

I have been present for a few now.  It often is a difficult and painful 
process regardless of where it is held and the pre-suppositions of all 
involved.   As our brain size has grown human birth process has become 
more difficult.  First time deliveries are nearly invariantly the most 
difficult and the labor the longest.   The difficulty increases with 
age.    That said a very supportive and happy setting definitely is a 
huge improvement over the old sterile hospital approach.   However, 
enough can go wrong that birthing in a hospital with a better birthing 
center or within minutes of one is definitely to be preferred.

> 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?
>
First or subsequent births and at what age and in what physical 
condition?  Many of these cultures are not known for great child 
mortality (for a variety of reasons) or for longevity.    So it is not 
so simple.



> 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.

They were men after all in cultures that largely denigrated women.   Not 
exactly trustworthy evidence.

- samantha